Marahute

Marahute is a giant golden mother eagle who appears in Disney's 1990 animated film The Rescuers Down Under.
==Background==
=== Development ===
Serving as the supervising animator on the eagle character Marahute, Glen Keane studied six eagles residing at the Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho, as well as a stuffed American eagle loaned from the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and an eagle skeleton. To animate the eagle, Keane and his animation crew enlarged the bird, shrank its head, elongated its neck and wings, and puffed out its chest. Additionally, Keane had to slow the bird's wing movements to about 25–30 percent of an eagle's flight speed. Because of the excessive details on Marahute, who carried 200 feathers, the character appeared for only seven minutes altogether, during the opening and ending sequences. "Building Character From the Ground Up". Los Angeles Times.
===Personality===
Marahute is portrayed as a very kind and gentle giant lady eagle, though her massive girth can cause problems (at one point, one of her wings accidentally knocks Cody off the tall cliff they're on, though she quickly saves him). Appearance-wise, she most closely resembles a cross between a white-bellied sea eagle and a wedge-tailed eagle, the two largest species of eagle native to Australia, although with a wingspan of 40ft (12 meters) she is much larger than either. She can also be compared to the extinct giant Haast's eagle than the aforementioned animal.
The eagless has a lot of love for Cody, grateful that he saved her, and is a very caring friend and mother-figure toward her friends and eggs respectively as well as her mate - as seen when he asked where the father of the eggs was, she displayed very high sadness and grief. She's also extremely loyal to those loyal to her, having saved Cody's life not once, but twice in the film. She is also shown to be quite intelligent and has a sense of humor, as shown when she tickles him during the flight scene and when she takes him water-skiing along the river.
==Role in the film==
Marahute, the beautiful and loving eagle princess, first appears when Cody finds her entangled in a trap. Cody unveils his pocketknife to break her free, the sight of which causes her to panic, unaware that the boy is actually trying to help her. After he manages to free her, she accidentally knocks him off the cliff with one of her large wings. She then immediately repays the debt and rescues him, before taking him for a fun ride in the sky. She then shows him her nest with her eggs in it, revealing that she is a mother. However, when asked about her mate, she looked down in sorrow, revealing that her mate had disappeared and never came back (it was later revealed that he was killed by McLeach), a gold feather is seen and Cody catches it. She gives it to him as a gift for saving her. He hugs her and on the ground, she flies off. She isn't seen again until later, where she ended up captured with Cody unwittingly getting McLeach to her (he earlier told him that she was killed by another hunter knowing full well that Cody would attempt to rush to the nest, and thus lead him straight to it). She was later freed by the Miss Bianca and Jake, and saves Cody from falling down the falls. While Marahute flies, Bernard and Miss Bianca get engaged and Cody says, "Come on, Marahute, let's all go home". They then all fly off into the moonlit night sky.
Marahute's eggs were also well protected by Bernard and (albeit unwillingly) by Wilbur, as Joanna was instructed to eat them as soon as Marahute was captured, so Bernard ended up tricking her by replacing the nest with three egg-shaped rocks while hiding the real ones inside the nest, and then had Wilbur roost them until they hatched.
==Gallery==
==Trivia==
*Her true species is not truly confirmed. In the film, Faloo calls her a "Great Golden Eagle", although whether or not this is her "species" or just a name for her regarding her size is not known. Appearance-wise, she resembles a cross between a wedge-tailed eagle and a white-bellied sea eagle, two species of eagles native to Australia, although she is much larger than either.
*Her cry, rather than that of an eagle, is sourced from a red-tailed hawk. This species' distinctive shriek is a stock sound effect that is used in film as a generic call for birds of prey. Funnily enough the sound used for the Hawk in The Sword in the Stone is that of an Eagle.
fr:Marahute
Category:Females
Category:Disney characters
Category:Heroines
Category:Silent characters
Category:Characters who fly
Category:Giants
Category:Australian characters
Category:Parents
Category:Adults
Category:Widows/Widowers
Category:Eagles
Category:The Rescuers characters
Category:Wonderful World of Color
Category:Animated characters
Category:Characters in the Disney animated features canon