Books of the Jungle

As Disney's THE JUNGLE BOOK arrives in theaters this Friday, let's take a look back at the studio's previous adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's 1894 collection of moral fables set within the jungles of India...

THE JUNGLE BOOK
(ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FAMILY) 
Released 18 October 1967
Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman
Featuring the Voices of: Phil Harris, Sebastian Cabot, Bruce Reitherman, George Sanders, Sterling Holloway, Louis Prima, J. Pat O'Malley, Verna Felton, Clint Howard
Rated G
78 minutes
Marketed as the "last animated film to have Walt Disney's personal touch", THE JUNGLE BOOK was the studio's 19th animated feature film and the last one over which Walt oversaw production before his death on 15 December 1966.  The movie was released 10 months later in October 1967.
It's widely accepted as a classic, but I'm going to offer an unpopular opinion.  It's fine.  It can't touch the greatness of Disney's Golden Age (SNOW WHITE, PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA, DUMBO and BAMBI), nor is it on the level of second-tier Disney classics like PETER PAN, CINDERELLA, ALICE IN WONDERLAND or ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS.  It's not as beautiful and lavishly crafted as SLEEPING BEAUTY or LADY AND THE TRAMP, but it's a lot livelier, and it's an improvement on the studio's previous feature, THE SWORD IN THE STONE.
With its many anthropomorphized animal characters, THE JUNGLE BOOK is an opportunity for Disney's animators to ply their pencils toward something fun, if not especially adventurous, artistically.  It's a very loose adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of moral fables set within the jungles of India, keeping the focus on Mowgli, as per usual, while eliminating all other human characters from the main narrative.  Even so, the story is episodically structured, as Mowgli (voiced by director Wolfgang Reitherman's son, Bruce), an abandoned "man-cub" encounters various animals with varied interests as the panther Bagheera (voiced by sitcom actor and recurring Disney voice, Sebastian Cabot) tries to deliver the unwilling boy to the Man Village before he runs into the man-hating king of the jungle, the tiger Shere Khan.

The marvelously sardonic George Sanders transposes his famous personality into Shere Khan, making him into one of the more fun, and still sufficiently threatening, Disney villains, digging his claw around in the python Kaa's nostril in the middle of an interrogation.  On the other hand, the dominating personality of the film, for better or worse, is that of radio personality Phil Harris, best known as the band leader from The Jack Benny Program, here voicing Baloo the bear, a character who he would essentially reprise in next two Disney productions (as "Thomas O'Malley" in THE ARISTOCATS and 'Little John" in ROBIN HOOD).  The thing about Harris is that a little of him goes a long way, and there is a lot of him in THE JUNGLE BOOK, resulting his character's likability coming and going in waves.  The standout character of the movie is the wacko King Louie, an orangutan with a professed desire to be human (you know, like Ariel in THE LITTLE MERMAID), who wants Mowgli to give him man's secret to creating fire.  Voiced by "The King of Swing" Louis Prima, a somewhat past his prime jazz musician of Italian heritage, the character of Louie and the other monkeys has sometimes been accused of black racial stereotyping (because everything Disney is "secretly racist!"), and to be fair, it walks a fine line, but ultimately, I think it's more a case of good old-fashioned white appropriation of black culture.  Either way, it's a funny character.
Where the movie really thrives is in its soundtrack, both the musical score by Disney house composer George Bruns, properly ominous and exotic, and the jazzy musical numbers by Richard and Robert Sherman, especially "I Wan'na Be Like You", and Terry Gilkyson's iconic "The Bare Necessities", which are the movie's biggest pick-me-ups.  For all its zesty style, the movie hits a hard bummer note in the third act once Mowgli meets the vultures, initially modeled in part on The Beatles, who were meant to voice the characters before scheduling fell through.  Voiced with Liverpudlian accents anyway, the mop-topped vultures are a series of dumb jokes culminating in the irritating barbershop quartet-style number, "That's What Friends Are For".  Matching the new change in color palette, the movie strikes a note of gray blahs at this point.  When it ends, it ends abruptly, clumsily, though reasonably, putting a cap on the series of episodes.

THE JUNGLE BOOK comes at a point in Disney animation soon after the development of the revolutionary Xerox process, which removed the need for animators' drawings to be inked onto animation cels by hand, but resulted in generally "scratchy" lines during its earlier uses.  Animators preferred the more full preservation of their drawings, as opposed to hand-inked films where only the lines deemed fully necessary were translated by the inker, but for better or worse (and I'm sure plenty of people would argue 'better'), THE JUNGLE BOOK exchanges that pristine quality for something just a little messier.  Sometimes it seems like everyone has fleas though.
The movie has lots of fun animal gags, jazzy tunes and some fairly endearing characters, but it feels more like a kids' movie than the upper-tier Disney animated features.  It's the kind of movie that would be fine to watch with your kids, but there's not much to get out of it on your own as an adult.  It's frothy and a little annoying at times.  Within the timeline of Disney productions, it's unmistakably a product of Walt's latter years when, with exception of Disneyland and EPCOT, his output grew increasingly safe, although pleasant and friendly.  No longer the bold, experimenting folk artist of the studio's peak years, he had become "Uncle Walt", the kind old gentleman who introduced episodes of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, more a brand than a person.  It's a vibrant, mostly peppy studio product, but definitely a studio product, and one with which its endearing qualities only get it so far.

RUDYARD KIPLING'S THE JUNGLE BOOK
(ADVENTURE/FAMILY) 
Released 25 December 1994
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Starring: Jason Scott Lee, Lena Headey, Cary Elwes, John Cleese, Sam Neill, Jason Flemyng, Stephan Kalipha, Ron Donachie, Faran Tahir
Rated PG for action/violence and some mild language.
111 minutes
Before he became known for big-budget, CGI-laden action-adventure B movies like THE MUMMY, VAN HELSING and G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA, Stephen Sommers got his start at Disney, where he wrote and directed much lower-budget action-adventure B movies with only a few seconds of computer-generated imagery at most.  The follow-up to his Disney-produced loose adaptation of Mark Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (decent, but very cheesy and featuring a terrible child performance by Elijah Wood), Sommers' THE JUNGLE BOOK (also known as RUDYARD KIPLING'S THE JUNGLE BOOK, following in the footsteps of the box office hit BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA (1992) and MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (1994)) is hardly even an adaptation as much as it is a typical Tarzan adventure with a few of Kipling's characters (ones recognizable from the 1967 animated film anyway) playing the parts.  Mowgli is shown to be thought lost in a tiger attack by the fearsome Shere Khan when, as a mere tot, his father (who is killed by the tiger) is leading British Colonel Geoffrey Brydon (Sam Neill) and his little girl, Katherine "Kitty", to his new post.  Sommers' quickly brushes over any of Mowgli's adventures in the jungle however, as the film soon jumps ahead to years later when Mowgli, now a muscular young wild man played by Jason Scott Lee, has a tumultuous reintroduction to civilization, represented in the good by the now grown and blossomed Kitty Brydon (Lena Headey) and Dr. Julius Plumford (John Cleese), who help him to learn English and behave "civilized", and represented in the bad by the oblivious Col. Brydon's sinister protege and suitor of Kitty's, Captain William Boone (Cary Elwes), who wants Mowgli to lead him to the mythical Monkey City in the jungle, said to contain mountains of treasure.

Very much an old-fashioned, Saturday matinee-style B movie, it makes use of matte paintings for exterior shots of the jungle ruins making up Monkey City and occasional other scenery, while, in the early days of prohibtively expensive computer animation (the first instance of photo-realistic computer-animated creatures had only first appeared in JURASSIC PARK the year before), live animals are used, but with a few exceptions, clearly not at the same time as the human actors.  As with Sommers' Mummy movies, THE JUNGLE BOOK is problematic in its treatment of race and colonialism as it follows in the tradition of old adventure movies like GUNGA DIN, and while the American-born Hawaiian-Chinese Jason Scott Lee plays the Indian hero, actual Indian actors are only cast in villainous roles.  The actual importance of these distinctions is debatable, but it gathers added attention in light of the retrograde depiction of colonialism and mystical Indian/Arabic stereotypes (in one scene, as British soldiers pursue Mowgli, a street magician plays a punji to cause a rope to rise out of a pot like a snake charmer, and another street performer is walking on hot embers).

Mostly, it's a movie aware of its B movie stylings, but the "love story" which Sommers' script proclaims the movie to be from right out the gate is weirdly self-aggrandizing, and amounts to very little.  Neither Headey or Lee are bad in their roles, but they are just as lacking in chemistry as Headey is with Elwes' romantic rival.  The acting is all over the map with lots of scenery chewing, but none are as hammy as Elwes (probably best known as "Wesley" from Rob Reiner's THE PRINCESS BRIDE) in the role of Captain Boone, a sadistic, mustache-twirling pompous ass of a British-accented snob.  Neill and Cleese also play into British stereotypes, the former a shouty military man, the latter being Cleese's usual stuffy, bumbling professor-type.  Cleese's Dr. Plumford is the movie's "comedic relief", but nearly all the comedy in the movie is of the light-hearted but laughless and unwitty sort.  Oh, and you can bet your arse that there's a Scotsman with a handlebar moustache and a temper that gets the best of him amongst Boone's crew of treasure hunters.  Headey, well, there's not much to say about Headey.  She's fine, but her character is such a generic "Jane" type that she simply doesn't have a lot of impact.  Lee, who later voiced "David" in the 2002 animated Disney feature LILO & STITCH, is a charming and funny adventure movie lead though.
The movie is rated PG for "action/violence and some mild language", a rating which Roger Ebert called "laughable", which is probably a bit overblown, but as a Disney movie, it is surprisingly violent/scary at times.  There are a few live-action Disney adventure movies from the '90s like that, being rated PG but definitely on the upper end of the rating, leavened slightly by their genre distinctions such as TALL TALE from the same year, where legendary cowboy Pecos Bill shoots off the "trigger fingers" of multiple gunmen, or THE THREE MUSKETEERS from the year before.  When I watched THE JUNGLE BOOK as a kid, I admit, the tiger scenes scared the crap out of me.  Watching them now, it's actually a bit amusing how obvious the staged animal and trainer "attacks" are, but seriously, back then it made me queasy.  The snake was always fun though, a combination of puppetry, a live anaconda, and a bit of very primitive CGI (ironically, the snake in ANACONDA from three years later doesn't look any better), guarding the treasure of Monkey City.  But yeah, it's  on the rough side for a Disney family film, but sometimes very silly with not enough action to satisfy young adult audiences of adventure movies, leaving it a little bit in limbo as to who the proper audience is.
Even still, regardless of their dubious quality, I can't help but enjoy THE JUNGLE BOOK and other PG-rated '90s Disney adventure movies of its ilk, and not for a sense of nostalgia.  I watched them in my childhood, but rarely more than once or twice, and there's not that emotional connection.  There's an outdated sense of innocence, even in the face of violence and peril, and the filmmaking is quaint but energetic.  THE JUNGLE BOOK was pretty old-fashioned when it came out in theaters 22 years ago, and unlike the animated movie, it's almost entirely waned from pop culture memory.  It doesn't deserve to stand as a classic today by any stretch, but it's a fun kind of movie that they rarely make anymore.  It's just a dumb, fun, overly romanticized B movie adventure yarn with nothing substantial to do with its namesake.

Images via Disney