It's not accurate to call this "Jungle Book" a "live-action" version, since so much of it has been generated on a computer. But screenwriter Justin Marks, director Jon Favreau and their hundreds of collaborators render such distinctions moot. Combining spectacular widescreen images of rain forests, watering holes and crumbling temples, a couple of human actors, and realistic mammals, birds and reptiles that nevertheless talk, joke and even sing in celebrity voices, the movie creates its own dream-space that seems at once illustrated and tactile. It's the sort of movie you might inadvertently dream about after re-reading one of Rudyard Kipling's source books or re-watching the 1967 animated Disney film, both of which contributed strands of this one's creative DNA.
The Disney animated version was the last cartoon feature personally overseen by Walt Disney, and its release one year after his death marked the start of a period of creative wandering for the company (though other features that had been in development for years, most of them lackluster, would appear throughout the decade that followed). Like a lot of the company's 1960s and '70s output, it was relaxed to a fault—a succession of beautifully rendered, mostly jokey set-pieces strung together by memorable songs, including "The Bare Necessities," "I Wanna Be Like You" and the python’s seduction song "Trust in Me"—but it still made a deep impression on '60s and '70s kids like the 49-year-old Favreau. This incarnation is a more straightforward telling that includes just two brief, according-to-Hoyle musical numbers, "The Bare Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You"—performed by Sethi with Murray and Walken, respectively. It relegates a longer version of the ape's song and a torch-song-y version of "Trust in Me," performed by Johansson, to the approximately seven-minute end credits sequence, which is so intricately imagined as to be worth the ticket price by itself. Other numbers, including the elephants' marching song and "That's What Friends Are For," performed by a barbershop quartet of mop-topped vultures, are MIA, presumably in the interest of pacing.
I mention all this not because I consider the film's lack of music a shortcoming, but because it gives some indication of how gracefully this "Jungle Book" juggles the competing interests of parents and kids. Musically, visually and tonally, there are enough nods to the 1967 version to satisfy nostalgia buffs, but not so many that the film becomes a glorified rehash. Kipling's tales are a stronger influence, down to the scenes where the wolves, Mowgli and other creatures recite a stripped-down version of Kipling's poem "The Law of The Jungle" ("...For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf/and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack"). And there are nods to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories and the masterful comics illustrator Burne Hogarth's adaptations, which seem to have influenced the way the movie's CGI artists render the movie's trees: as gnarled, knuckled, pretzel-twisted, vine-shrouded wonders, rising from the forest floor.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lmqq7qLjEZpmop5tif3F9lQ%3D%3D