In an industry that reboots the same stories every five years (yes, I’m looking at you, Spider-Man), it seems positively slothful for Disney only now to be taking its fourth bite of the Mr Kipling cake. The Jungle Book was the final animated movie that Walt Disney worked on – it was released in October 1967, ten months after his death – and it looks now like a pop-culture time capsule, with its beatnik Baloo and its Liverpudlian moptop vultures. In between that and a 2003 animated sequel, the studio put out a worthy adaptation in 1994 which seemed to apologise both for Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism and for not being a cartoon.
The latest version is directed by Jon Favreau, who has a knack for fizzy family entertainment (Elf) while also knowing the blockbuster market (he made two Iron Man movies). In combining computer animation and live action, Favreau’s Jungle Book seems initially to represent the best of both worlds. He found a sprightly newcomer, Neel Sethi, then aged ten, to play Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves after being orphaned in the jungle. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Sethi, the only non-CG presence in the film, interacts so naturally with characters who aren’t really there. Isn’t that what ten-year-olds spend most of their time doing anyway? His reactions to his digital co-stars, though, are every bit as vital to the suspension of disbelief as anything done behind the scenes by the pipeline software developers and the senior fur groomers.
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