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The Jungle Book

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‘the jungle book’: film review.

Jon Favreau directs the latest film rendition of the Rudyard Kipling classic with sophisticated CGI visuals and a starry voice cast.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The beguilingly credible CGI rendering of real-life animals takes its biggest leap forward since Life of Pi in Disney’s new telling of The Jungle Book . Exceptionally beautiful to behold and bolstered by a stellar vocal cast, this umpteenth film rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s tales of young Mowgli’s adventures amongst the creatures of the Indian jungle proves entirely engaging, even if it’s ultimately lacking in subtext and thematic heft. Most Jungle Book big-screen adaptations have done very well at the box office — the 1967 version, the last animated film Walt Disney personally supervised, was the second-biggest grosser of its year, behind only The Graduate — and this one will be no exception upon its April 15 release as it takes the baton from the studio’s fresher, more original smash Zootopia .

Nor will this be the last we hear of Mowgli , Shere Khan, Kaa and the others for a while. Warner Bros.’ live-action Jungle Book: Origins, directed by Andy Serkis and featuring the likes of Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett , Benedict Cumberbatch and Serkis himself as Baloo the bear, started shooting a year ago and is set for release in October 2017.

Release date: Apr 15, 2016

From the embracing opening image (extra effective in 3D), which smoothly backtracks from the Cinderella castle logo right into the jungle setting, director Jon Favreau makes his new film instantly welcoming with its wonderfully detailed wilderness environment anyone would swear is real. It also provides clear dramatic orientation through the imposing voice of narrator Ben Kingsley in the guise of the black panther Bagheera, who watches over orphaned Indian boy Mowgli (Neel Sethi, who’s limber, energetic and a tad emphatic at times). The latter has been raised by wolves but can scamper through the trees with the assurance of a monkey and is able to survive partly by virtue of a truce that allows all animals to gather around a watering hole without fear of becoming lunch for their natural predators.

Justin Marks’ script may veer rather too far from reality in depicting its jungle creatures as fundamentally peaceable, apart from the menacing tiger Shere Khan ( Idris Elba , oozing malignant nuance) and Kaa, an enormous tree-dwelling serpent given hypnotically seductive voice by Scarlett Johansson . To be sure, Disney has not dropped the genre’s sure-fire comic-relief staples (a baby elephant, a cutesy little porcupine), but the exceptional photographic realism lends the work a real-world gravity that sets it leagues apart from the strenuously ingratiating kid-pic conventions in the likes of the Madagascar or Ice Age series, for example, and will help invest even adult audiences in the incident-packed adventure. Not only in their appearances are the creatures here quite far from being traditional cartoon critters; they talk (predominantly in distinguished British-tinged English) among themselves and with Mowgli, who possesses a conspicuously American accent.

The action pivots on Bagheera’s decision that it’s finally time for Mowgli to leave his jungle home and join his own species. Protesting that he doesn’t have a clue what humans are like, Mowgli is finally convinced when the wise panther promises to see him to his destination, resulting in a treacherous trek that leads them across increasingly inhospitable landscapes and into contact with all manner of animals. It’s like a Heart of Darkness for kids.

The tone significantly shifts with the arrival of Baloo ( Bill Murray ), a genial rascal of a bear whose addiction to honey instantly stamps him as a grown-up Winnie the Pooh. Strenuous effort has been expended to inject every line of Baloo’s ever-flowing commentary with snappy comedy, a challenge met with success perhaps half the time. It also falls to Murray to resurrect Terry Gilkyson’s song “The Bare Necessities” from the 1967 film.

But while the simple Baloo is content with the massive honeycombs Mowgli is able to procure for him, a more formidable figure awaits in a spectacular abandoned ancient city. Kidnapped by no-nonsense monkeys, Mowgli is put at the mercy of the Godfather of the jungle, a grossly overgrown orangutan named King Louie (Christopher Walken) who talks with an old New Yawk accent and insists that Mowgli “summon the red flower,” the animals’ term for the one thing humans seem to possess and control that animals can’t: fire. For his part, sometime song-and-dance man Walken gets to reprise the Sherman Brothers’ tune Louis Prima handled 49 years ago, “I Wan’na Be Like You.”

The action finale, while well staged, is pretty predictable and includes a bad-guy death that repeats the same means of demise that greets the vast majority of Disney arch-villains going back decades (no hints, but it would be great to have this remarkable consistency explained).

But even as the drama and its treatment become increasingly conventional and familiar as the film moves toward its patly (and arguably overly) audience-pleasing wrap-up, the exceptional visual quality and lifelike animal renditions remain stunning throughout. Favreau and cinematographer Bill Pope vigorously keep the camera moving at all but the quietest moments, and the visual effects team led by Robert Legato and Adam Valdez has both created sumptuous settings that look as lifelike as any CGI ever presented in a studio feature and integrated both humans and animal characters into them in seamless ways. After having completely succeeded in transporting you to its primeval jungle setting, the pic concludes, at the very end of the lengthy final credits, with the cheeky note, “Filmed in Downtown Los Angeles.” At least one sort of movie magic is still very much at work here.

Distributor: Disney Production: Fairview Entertainment Cast: Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Scarlett Johansson, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Walken, Garry Shandling, Brighton Rose Director: Jon Favreau Screenwriter: Justin Marks, based on the books by Rudyard Kipling Producers: Jon Favreau, Brigham Taylor Executive producers: Peter Tobyansen, Molly Allen, Karen Gilchrist Director of photography: Bill Pope Production designer: Christopher Glass Costume designer: Laura Jean Shannon Editor: Mark Livolsi Music: John Debney Visual effects supervisors: Robert Legato, Adam Valdez Casting: Sarah Halley Finn

Rated PG, 107 minutes

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Review: Recycled ‘Jungle Book’ Puts a Real Boy in a Forest of Pixels

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By Manohla Dargis

April 14, 2016

Disney’s new take on “The Jungle Book” is being touted as a live-action movie, though there’s scarcely anything alive in it. That goes for the gaudy and glorious flora, the gathering clouds and the wind stirring them, all of which were created, with various degrees of believability, via computers. The child playing Mowgli — the human orphan turned wolf child — is played by an actual kid, who frolics with computer-generated critters, a smart call, given that animals can be tricky to work with and that some of this menagerie’s real-life equivalents are (sorry to be a bummer) endangered.

Studios are in the recycling business, and while this “The Jungle Book” is lightly diverting, it is also disappointing, partly because it feels like a pumped-up version of Disney’s 1967 animated film, with more action and less sweetness. It also feels strangely removed from our moment. About the only thing that feels of today is that its lush and arid environments and padding paws were digitally created. The resulting look, pitched between photorealism and impressionism, hovers between the realistic and the uncanny. It turns out that the movie was shot in a Los Angeles warehouse , which paradoxically seems like an old-fashioned way to make worlds.

Disney’s first version opened in the United States a year after the country created its first list of endangered species. The studio may not have been thinking of “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson ’s 1962 environmental shocker, but “The Jungle Book” hinges on a barefoot child who lives in a furry, fanged commune right out of a pastoral idyll. The film features tangy vocal performances, hand-drawn animation and the ear-worming ditty “The Bare Necessities.” But it also has queasy-making passages, none more so than the scene in which Louis Prima , as the orangutan King Louie, sings a Dixieland version of “I Wanna Be Like You” — “An ape like me/Can learn to be human, too” — which the songwriters Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman wrote with Louis Armstrong in mind.

Richard M. Sherman later said that Disney rejected casting a black man, fearing potential trouble with the N.A.A.C.P. For all the ostensible timelessness of its storytelling, Disney has always made movies that speak to its audiences and the world they live in. Even so, it’s hard not to squirm through the number with Prima’s scatting ape because of the troubling signifiers it throws out. At the same time, the film partly alleviates, however unwittingly, Rudyard Kipling ’s weighty colonialist baggage, both by giving Mowgli, an Indian child, a golly-gee American voice, and by casting George Sanders as the villainous tiger, Shere Khan, who sounds just as you would expect a world-weary British royal to sound after centuries of pillaging. So, a mixed Disney bag, as usual, with a hippie kid, confusing politics and fuzzy-wuzzies.

Movie Review: ‘The Jungle Book’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “the jungle book.”.

Directed by Jon Favreau, the busy redo continues Hollywood’s infatuation with British actors, though this time it’s Idris Elba who puts the purr into Shere Khan. Much like the 1967 movie, this one has a loose relationship with the Kipling tales, originally published in 1894. It’s no surprise, given Kipling’s gravity, that the 2016 movie sticks close to the first film in its boyish bounce and sunny vibe. Written by Justin Marks, it opens with Mowgli (Neel Sethi) as a prepubescent, racing alongside his protector, the panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), who years earlier placed him in the care of a mother wolf, Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o). Much of the story involves Shere Khan’s plotting against Mowgli amid adventures with Baloo the bear (Bill Murray), Kaa the snake (Scarlett Johansson) and others.

Shere Khan is still the baddie, but now he’s lethally, instead of imperiously, cool, which seems unfair, given that Bengal tigers are endangered. The rest of the adult animals, meanwhile, largely register as noble, particularly the elephants that Bagheera and Mowgli bow down before. In the 1967 film, the elephants are amusingly buffoonish and march in a pachyderm parade as their leader invokes his time with the maharajah. The 2016 movie doesn’t refer directly to our environmental catastrophes, including the decimation of the elephant population. Yet when Bagheera now instructs Mowgli to bow before the elephants, it feels as if the filmmakers were gesturing to the truth that this fantasy and its relation to the real world are now tragically different from what they were in Kipling’s time.

And when Mowgli helps out the elephants, there’s a suggestion that humans can play their part in their rescue, which is a comforting moral for the children who are this movie’s main audience. At the same time, it would be heartening if Disney took a more environmentally aware stance in the sequel that’s already been discussed, especially given that the company’s brand owes as much to the natural world as to princesses. In recent years, the Disney princess has undergone a radical makeover, evolving into a can-do figure who exists in that cinematic sweet spot between her fantastical world and our real one. The studio’s animal kingdom could use a comparable makeover.

In the Kipling stories, every creature abides by the Law of the Jungle, a decree that’s been read as a proxy for British imperialist rule. Both the 1967 and 2016 Mowglis, by contrast, live under the Law of Disney, which dictates that humans can exist with nature, as long as nature isn’t too wild. There’s an argument to be made against that kind of cuddly domination of nature. Yet it’s also true that generations have grown up loving and respecting animals (as animals, not just human surrogates) because of the peaceable kingdom that Disney has created. Here’s hoping that next time Mowgli shows up onscreen, he trades in his four-legged foe for some two-legged villains — before the only wild worlds we have left are computer-generated.

“The Jungle Book” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested) for child and animal action-movie peril. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

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