Magic Mixies’ Tolkien inspiration?

 

This week, I’ve teased you on social media with this image:

If you’re familiar with the Magic Mixies only as toys, you surely saw that the various cute magical creatures in a myriad of colours (and lately the Pixling dolls – but still cute only female fairies) didn’t really resemble the noble Elves and fairly normal fauna of Middle-Earth. The gimmick of conjuring them with magical wands and cauldrons might be more reminiscent of Harry Potter, so you may have been confused by the mention of Tolkien. (I may devote a separate post to my thoughts on the Mixies toys in the future.)

If you watch(ed) the Magic Mixies cartoon, you may have thought: “Okay, a girl rummages through a grandpa’s attic and ends up going through a portal into a magical world… isn’t that Narnia rather than Middle-Earth? Surely you didn’t mix up the Inklings?” (If you didn’t watch the cartoon, you can do it on MooseTube’s official YouTube channel here. The playlist contains both episodes and compilations, but it’s easy to tell them apart by title.)

I did not, of course, confuse Tolkien with Lewis: I did play a double deception card, however. Firstly, I did not mean that Magic Mixies in general were Tolkien-inspired: “this” in the meme above was precisely the single character pictured, Luggle.

In case you don’t know her, a brief introduction: like all Mixlings, Luggle looks like a mix of several real-life animals. She resembles a rabbit most of all, but she does have cloven hooves on her feet, and she can extend her neck to telescopic proportions. She also really, really likes to eat. When Sienna first summoned her, she was about to eat her soup, and she is often seen eating something, including things not conventionally edible. And there was this one episode that started with her feeling unwell due to everything she previously ate. But I digress.

The second point of the little deception was me counting on most people (and rightly so!) thinking “Middle-Earth” as soon as Tolkien’s name was mentioned. As some of you may know, aside from his work on the deep worldbuilding of Middle-Earth, Tolkien also wrote a number of children’s books less serious than The Hobbit, mostly for the amusement of his own children. Some of them were published during his lifetime, some posthumously; some did take place in Middle-Earth (or at least a version of it), while some did not.

One of the latter is Mr. Bliss – a picture-book full of Tolkien’s dainty illustrations, about the adventures of the eponymous gentleman living in the English countryside who decides to buy a motor-car, but ends up with a lot of misadventures with both his own neighbours and the Three Bears living in a nearby wood.

The story is lively and humorous, obviously meant for smaller children. It doesn’t contain too many elements of the fantastic: in fact, there are only two. One is the Three Bears talking, living in a house etc. like humans: a fairytale staple, but replace them with forest brigands, and the story would remain essentially the same. The other, however, though at first seemingly cosmetic, is of significant relevance to the story. That is Mr. Bliss’s exotic pet: the Girabbit.

As its name suggests, the Girabbit is something between a giraffe and a rabbit: it has the head and body of a rabbit, but joined by a giraffe’s long neck. It has very poor eyesight, but excellent hearing, and spends most of the time in a deep hole in the ground near Mr. Bliss’s house, coming out mostly in the morning and evening to eat. And when it doesn’t eat – well, a quote from roughly the middle of the book seems suitable:

Poor Mr. Bliss knew nothing of all this. He was having fresh troubles. As soon as he got to the top of the hill (very tired) he looked up at his chimney. Then he stood still in the road.

"I am blessed and bothered," he said, "if it isn't the Girabbit's head sticking out of my chimney; and he seems to be munching carpet" (that's why he looked like a flag from far away).

It was the Girabbit's head! Mr. B. had gone off and forgotten to feed it, so it had burst open the back-door, squeezed in finally into the dining-room, and eaten its way through the ceiling into the best bedroom - and through the next ceiling into the attic, and up the attic chimney, knocking off the pots. There he was blinking in the morning sun with a large piece of the best-bedroom hearthrug in his mouth.

This will give you some idea of what Mr. Bliss saw when he got inside.

I won’t tell you how the book ends, but let’s just say this wasn’t the last we see of the Girabbit, or its eating habits. :)

 

Now, of course, I do not know for a fact that whoever designed Luggle was inspired by Mr. Bliss – and unless some developer notes or interviews are published, we may never know. They are different enough that it is certainly not a copy, and might as well be coincidence. But still – they are similar enough that one can’t help but wonder! It didn’t immediately cross my mind when I started to get the know the Mixies, but at one point I was holding the Luggle toy, thinking about some scenes from the cartoon, and then it suddenly flashed before my eyes – such a cute bunny head… but it can stretch out a very long neck… and it happily eats borderline everything in its path… her tail even resembles a giraffe’s… oh my Tolkien, Luggle is Girabbit!

 

What do you think? Do you think someone at Moose is a fan of Mr. Bliss, or am I stretching a connection too far? I’m looking forward to any discussion in the comments!