directed by Jon Favreau
written by Justin Marks
The 1967 animated film adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book came out a full eight years before I was born, but I did enjoy it on home video. Still, it wasn't exactly my most cherished of Disney films, though perhaps the song "Bear Necessities" was one of my most early "earworms."
I am, however, a fan of director Jon Favreau's work, and have been ever since he and Robert Downey Jr. launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2008's Iron Man, and when I found out late last year that he was doing a live-action adaptation of the popular animated film I immediately took interest. Knowing that heavyweights Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley and Christopher Walken would be getting some pretty plum roles as the voices behind (respectively) Baloo, Bagheera and King Louie got me even more interested.
The story begins with Bagheera narrating how he found the boy Mowgli (Neel Sethi) alone in the jungle, his parents dead, and entrusted him to a pack of wolves. Having been raised by Raksha (Lupita Nyong'o) Mowgli is now around ten years old and running through the jungle. His wolf father chides him for his "tricks" which is how they refer to his human ingenuity. When a drought brings all of the jungle animals to the one spot of the river where there is still water, with predators and prey observing a "water truce," the tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba), approaches, and sniffs out the man-cub, his most hated enemy, telling the wolf pack that, while he will respect the truce, the moment the rains come and normalcy is restored, he will hunt Mowgli down and kill any wolf that gets in his way. In short order, the rains return, and just as the wolves debate on what to do with Mowgli, he makes their decision easier by leaving the wolf pack and, accompanied by Bagheera, makes his way to the human village. When he and Bagheera are attacked by Shere Khan and separated, however, Mowgli finds himself alone, where he meets various colorful characters, like the giant python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson), the intimidating and amusing gigantopithecus King Louie (Christopher Walken) and the endearing con-artist of a bear Baloo (Bill Murray). Shere Khan, however, upon learning of Mowgli's departure, is angered and, after a display of frightening brutality, asserts that nothing less than his death will satisfy him. Mowgli will soon need every "trick" he can think of to stay alive and to save those he loves from the threat of Shere Khan.
From the time that Disney started this business of adapting its animated classics into live-action movies (which actually started in 1996 with 101 Dalmatians, not in 2010 with Alice in Wonderland, as many people are asserting), I wasn't really fond of any of them prior to this movie, with the possible exception of last year's Cinderella, which I found charming, if noticeably flawed.
This film, however, I thoroughly enjoyed.
It was amazing to see how far we've come from the days when films featuring actors shot entirely against bluescreen looked like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or even 300. The world that Jon Favreau has wrought essentially using a single live actor interacting with puppets and the magic of computer imagery is easily the most extraordinary-looking jungle adventure since Avatar, and it definitely has that film beaten hands-down in the character development department.
The film is, at its heart, Mowgli's journey from boy (or wolf-cub) to man, and it was therefore essential for Favreau to get the casting absolutely right. I'm happy to say he did exactly that by picking newcomer Sethi, a New Yorker of Indian descent. This is a kid whose first major acting job involved him acting against puppets and non-existent backgrounds, and yet with the fully-realized film Sethi's acting feels very much at home. His chemistry with key characters like Bagheera, Baloo and Raksha is all the more remarkable for the fact that he was not actually acting against any of the actors playing them, all of whom recorded their lines elsewhere while the digital wizards at Moving Picture Company created their digital avatars. Finally, and I shouldn't even have to be saying this, it was so refreshing that for once, Hollywood finally cast an ethnically-appropriate actor as the lead, and not some token sidekick, in a major blockbuster. If Sethi, who's only 12, chooses a career in acting, I sincerely hope we get to see more of him, and not just in the probable sequel to this very successful movie.
As for the voice actors, while it was given that talented thespians like Kingsley, Murray, Nyong'O, Johansson, Elba and Walken would deliver sterling performances, I still found myself with how much they put into these roles. Elba's Shere Khan, for example, was utterly terrifying, and a huge improvement over George Sanders' comparatively effete take on the character. Kingsley brought a regal presence to Bagheera, which was something I dearly missed, especially after his somewhat strange turn in Iron Man 3. Murray's Baloo was quite distinct from Phil Harris', and while Harris is a better singer, I have to say few people can make con-artists as endearing as Murray can. Baloo was basically a furry Peter Venkman. I enjoyed the cameos from Jon Favreau, Sam Raimi (!) and the late Garry Shandling as smaller animals. I also liked Nyong'O's Raksha; the wolf mother character was largely absent from the 1967 film and I'm glad writer Marks gave her a much more significant presence here as I think both Mowgli's character and the story are all the richer for having her around. Walken's Louie is a highlight of an already impressive movie; there's a brilliance to how Favreau just strikes the right balance between menace and humor for the scene that introduces this character, a fifteen-foot ape that's a mixture of the Godfather and Apocalypse Now's Major Kurtz. Walken's King Louie even belts out the character's signature song from the 1967 film "I Wanna Be Like You." It's equally impressive that the eightysomething writer of that song managed to craft new lyrics for the song that included the word "gigantopithecus." Composer John Debney did an excellent job updating these classic tunes and composing a full-bodied score from the movie with both old and new material.
Finally, due credit must go to the wizards at MPC and Weta, without whom this movie would have just been a kid in orange trunks just walking around a bunch of blue screens and talking to a bunch of puppets and stand-ins. As impressive as their previous bodies of work may have been (and in the case of Weta, that resume is considerable), this basically puts all their previous work in the shade.
This movie is utterly charming, deserves at least one viewing in the theater, as well as a spot in any Disney movie lover's home video collection (whatever the format).
8.8/10
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