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The Jungle Book
Director: Jon Favreau
Featuring: Neel Sethi, Bill Murray,
Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Christopher Walken and Scarlett Johansson
4/5
For many of us, Disney’s 1967 animated film of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is how we first experienced this writer’s work. The animated film was set to a swinging, jazzy soundtrack that still gets most people’s hum on. Baloo, King Louie, Bagheera, Kaa and Shere Khan are all part of the cast of characters of our childhoods.
Which is why director Jon Favreau’s 2016 version is so clever. He leans more towards Kipling’s original tale in making it a coming-of-age tale, with real peril on the journey. But he is also respectful of pop culture’s collective memory, injecting elements of the original film into this CGI-rich, photo-real version.
It also captures fully the mysticism and wonder that the original 1894 story had. The animals are larger than life, the jungle seethes with energy and often with menace. The elephants return to their rightful place as the mysterious bringers of life and Mowgli’s hypnotic encounter with the mesmerising Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) is likely to give everyone the shivers.
King Louie (Christopher Walken) is a creature of imagination based on Indian legend and the Gigantopithecus fossils of palaeontology. He is presented as a jungle version of a yeti – an elusive character with a dark side. He will stay with this new generation of children in as enduring a way as the original stayed with the last.
Mowgli, played by Neel Sethi, is the only human in the film and has a lot to do. The actor, who turns 13 in December, is full of mischief as the boy cub who faces expulsion from the jungle when the fearsome Shere Khan (Idris Elba) returns, bearing the scars of an encounter with man’s red flower. To save his life, Mowgli must leave his home as part of the wolf pack and travel to the nearest human village with the panther Bagheera.
So begins an epic journey that blends all the magic that modern film making can conjure and will go straight on to the list of Disney classics. My only criticism is that it doesn’t need to be in 3-D; it is so rich in imagination and detail that the added gimmickry feels superfluous.
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