The Jungle Book 2016 Movie Review

The Jungle Book (2016)

2/9/2017

C+
2.33

A retelling of Disney classic The Jungle Book using modern CGI

Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, and Idris Elba
Initial Review by Bryan Hartman

I have no recollection of The Jungle Book books nor the animated movie from the 90s other than Baloo nearly dies. I wish I knew how true to the original this story was compared to the animated version.

The Jungle Book does a lot of things well. Once you get past the first scene, the CGI is nearly flawless. I’m not sure if my brain needed time to adjust or the CGI legitimately improved, but I was worried for my senses after Mowgli’s first sprint through the jungle. By the end, I hadn’t given the CGI another thought – it was spot on.

Mowgli’s innonce as a child is well done. And sorry ladies, but Mowgli has to be a boy here. Having raised a little boy and girl, it seems boys literally have no fear giving Mowgli the chance to approach Bagheera at a toddling age. Girls would have rightfully been frightened. It’s amazing boys survive. To Mowgli, Bagheera is just a big kitty. I’m surprised he didn’t meow at it.

The major downfall of many movies directed towards youth is a lull in the middle. The Jungle Book avoids this flaw. Maybe Baloo’s honey gathering could be The Jungle Book’s lull, but I didn’t mind it – I felt it gave a bit more character to Baloo and Mowgli.

The Jungle Book felt interactive, quick, and to the point, but it wasn’t without a couple of hiccups. Choosing actors and actresses with recognizable voices is downright distracting. The opening CGI, as mentioned, wasn’t top touch. Relying on cute timing during the first Shere Khan escape and water buffalo ride were not great ways to advance the plot. Last, it could have used an extra 15 minutes split among some of the side characters. I never felt fully vested.

TL;DR Mowgli’s innonce against Shere Khan’s ruthlessness, a host of memorable characters, and a quick story were tied together well for The Jungle Book. B+

PS: No, my 4-year-old daughter can’t watch this anytime soon. I’d rather not deal with weeks of nightmares.

10 Comments

Bryan

2/10/2017 09:14:37 am

Subscribing to comments.

2/14/2017 12:36:34 pm

You and Sean are talking me down from a B+, but I disagree with a couple of things.

1) If 1 animal can talk, the suspension of belief is gone, I don't see why it matters if 1/2 or all the rest can talk.
2) I'm not sure what tall grass thing you're talking about. He was traveling with the panther outside of their home base, he had to go through the grass, and was told to run through it.
3) Have you seen the live action Cinderella? I'd argue it's better than the original. The Cinderella story itself is garbage, but the remake isn't worse.

Jon

2/14/2017 03:11:30 pm

1. Suspension of disbelief rests on how consistently whatever fantastical rules the world operates on are applied. I have no problem with talking animals, but the movie is making me ask the question of why some can talk and others can't by having non-speaking animals in the first place.
2. Mowgli and Bagheera are moving from a non-grassy area to a grassy one, and Mowgli isn't changing anything about how he's acting. He should know that predators love tall grass after being in the jungle for a decade.
3. I haven't. Remaking these movies isn't the worst thing if they can make them better. It seems like Disney now has the technology (sort of) to make live-action recreations of their animated movies with all the talking animals they require, so they're just doing that with no major alterations, with the exception here being the ending that leaves open the certainty of sequels. Is that the case with Cinderella, or is the live-action one different than the animated one?

2/14/2017 04:23:07 pm

Maybe Mowgli hasn't seen tall grass prior to that moment? This is why the story needed more time. We needed more character development and details. However, I think what we were presented with was entertaining. Have you read the original book?

I'll have to ask Chelsea to compare and contrast the Cinderella movies. I don't have deep thoughts on that one.

Shane

2/16/2017 11:16:37 am

My 2 year old was fine, but he's probably not aware enough to be afraid yet. It was a bit intense, though.

2/14/2017 01:07:36 am

The Jungle Book provides me with a series of confirmations. Live action adaptations of Disney animated classics (Beauty and the Beast next month, practically every other one in the pipe) serve as yet another demonstration of how intellectually bankrupt big-studio moviemaking continues to be, and Jon Favreau's film isn't disabusing me of this thinking. I'm on the record somewhere as not being a big Favreau fan, and I'm not swayed by his work here, either. Also, in a grossly disrespectful Oscar speech, Chris Rock talked about how easy voice-acting was, where he would show up in a booth, lazily record some lines, and cash a big check for a few hours of work. There was probably some comedic exaggeration in there, but how long did Scarlett Johannson spend on her dialogue, really? The Jungle Book feels mercenary all the way through. There's obviously an audience for this, but I wouldn't include myself in that list.

I'm going to put most of the blame on writer Justin Marks, whose only previous feature credit is Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. It's not like he's starting from the best place, as I doubt anyone would call the Jungle Book one of the better Disney movies, but he doesn't improve on a thing that could definitely use improvement. There's so little consistency in this world of talking animals. Some animals can't talk, and it's not like just the dumb ones are rendered mute. The only speaking ape is King Louie, and the elephants, whose intelligent real-life counterparts would have returned to grieve at the spot where that calf died, if it had died, don't speak either. Do the animals that Mowgli's pack eats plead not to be eaten before they're torn asunder? Speaking of Mowgli, the character doesn't fit in the world for more reasons besides the obvious one. This is a kid who was raised by wolves, but has no sense of the dangers of tall grass, so Marks makes him dumber and therefore less likable for the sake of a cheap jump scare. There's no savagery in Mowgli, at all. His pack has all these ridiculous rules about tool use, but Africa is lousy with tool-using corvids (crows, ravens, etc). I know, because I just verified that corvids do indeed live all over the continent.

These plot/character holes are going to be in movies like this, or there wouldn't be such a robust youtube industry whose purpose is to find them all. In better directed movies, they become less noticeable. Favreau's not totally without talent, as there are several strong sequences, like everything with Kaa and everything with King Louie until he starts singing. I think he's cribbing from Under the Skin and Apocalypse Now, but still, those are effective scenes. It could have been the marvels of Shane's fancy TV, but the CGI did not look as seamless as I assumed it would. I don't have a great eye for that kind of thing, so if I have to make a note of it, it's not up to par. This fundamentally breaks the movie for me, and therefore allows me to focus on the script nonsense and eventually lose interest before the ending.

Theme-wise, The Jungle Book could easily be dismissed as fables for children, as it's believed to have been written by Rudyard Kipling for his young daughter. I'm not exactly sure what the moral is, though with a rudimentary understanding of imperialist Kipling, there might be something about returning to live with one's own kind and how anything else is weird and off-putting, or how the tools of a more advanced society will be greeted with fear followed by violence. The guy did write the White Man's Burden, so maybe the same kind of thing leaked into his fables.

The Jungle Book's greatest strength is its casting, particularly with Christopher Walken and Johannson. Bill Murray's in this reluctant mentor phase of his career, so that seems like a no-brainer. Idris Elba is obviously good at playing a threatening and unpredictable maniac, because he's good at everything. As Mowgli, Neel Sethi is fine. It's not as physical a performance as I thought it was going to be, thanks to some hokey editing, but he doesn't distract. Thankfully, Marks doesn't recreate the ending of the animated version, where Mowgli gets hypnotized by the first girl he sees and follows her into her camp. He instead gives Mowgli an equally generic revenge motivation, something probably easier to play for Sethi.

I barely liked this. Disney's just going to keep making overly cute remakes of their old classics, and people will see them, but based on how meh I feel about The Jungle Book, I'm not looking forward to any of them. As I always say, movies pitched at children don't have to treat their audience like children. Favreau's own Elf is a good example of exactly that, and hopefully he hasn't forgotten how to get the right mix. C-

Sean

2/14/2017 01:35:26 am

I recently had the animated version on repeat in the back of my car so I'm a bit of an expert. After about the 36th time I realized I wasn't just confused about how quickly they move the story along without much transition or flow because it played behind my head, they just didn't bother to include any of that in the story. It reminds me of the I Can Read series of books that convert a Spongebob episode into a 1st grade level reading book. The animated movie always felt like a 1st grade reader book converted the opposite direction with songs added.

I bring all that up to say the new movie didn't really improve on the missing elements. It's entertaining but less so than the cartoon. At least the cartoon had more songs to sing along to. I was hoping to hear Walken's version of the jazzy boogie woogie King Louie songs.

C+

Lane

2/14/2017 10:43:07 pm

At some point, I think I would really like to review old Disney films, including the original “The Jungle Book.” Until then, this will be a philosophical review…

Disney is in an interesting postmodern moment. The original Disney signaled what we should call first-wave hyper-reality. The theorist Jean Baudrillard describes hyper-reality as the moment when fiction and reality blend together so that the interpreter of each cannot distinguish one from the other. Disney was “first-wave” because it blended what was obviously fiction (movies and Mickey Mouse) with what was obviously real (immersive Disney vacations and Disney characters that would hug your kids). Those of us who routinely take a pilgrimage to Orlando (I’m leaving tomorrow) are still beneficiaries of this vision.

But the wall between ur-reality and reality is growing thinner in the 21st century, and I’m not just talking about Trump and fake news, though those are the most politically expedient examples. Our fictions are also our realities. Disney is once again at the threshold of what is real and what is hyper-real. Today, we have the technology to blend humans (brown kids and Emma Watson) into what is obviously animation. Except, the animation is so real and the real people are so puppeteerish that we are all caught in moments of suspended animation. And, in Disney’s world, animation—suspended or otherwise--is the point.

Unfortunately, when the veil of reality grows thin, so does the underlying profit motive behind it and, as the most cynical of postmodern theorists have shown, the only concrete foundation beyond our desire to experience artistic and spiritual transcendence is a Fortune 100 company’s desire to experience transcendent profit gain.

The original “Jungle Book” movie routinely shows up in the “Best Of” Disney lists you can find around the internet. I doubt this remake will. Why?

The original “Jungle Book” introduced unique characters that define their roles. This version simply offered riffs off the old characters. Why Christopher Walken for “King Louie”? Simple: because “King Louie” was originally played in the ’67 version by New Orleans legend Louis Prima and Walken could do the same accent. Walken sounded like Prima and so the deal was done, but was there any regard to the artistic originality that Prima brought to the “King Louie” role?

King Louie, in the original film, was unique because he embodied the filmmaking that Disney was putting forward. I might even argue that Louie was the central figure in the original film, encompassing a counter cultural ethos in a counter cultural time. King Louie was the film the Disney writers WANTED to make. But in this film, Louie is nothing more than a plot point. A narrative hurdle to get through. Walken is a reminder of the original film, but brings none of its cultural snuff, and that’s not Walken’s fault.

The bottom line of this movie is that it’s all about the bottom line. With the logical end of the “Toy Story” franchise, Disney needs a way to boost its stock price and hyper-real reboots of classic Disney franchises offer that opportunity. Unfortunately, we as consumers must bear the stale storytelling results.

Grade: C-

2/16/2017 11:06:56 am

Children should like it
Looks good, but not exciting
Overall, it's fine

C+

John Robert Peters, Jr.

3/10/2017 04:54:16 pm

Can't get over the fact that this is remake but it did well in its own right.