The Jungle Book

I loved the original Jungle Book as a child. My dad liked to sing Baloo’s songs to my sisters and I to amuse us. Given this nostalgia, I was reluctant to see the remake, for fear it would taint those happy childhood memories, but I ended up watching it because I couldn’t find anything else I wanted to see at the cinema, and one of my sisters had given it a decent review after seeing it with her boyfriend.

I would give it a 7 out of 10. It wavers between being more faithful to the original Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling and being faithful to the original Disney animated film of 1967. They kept two of the animated film’s most famous songs – Bare Necessities and I Want to Be Like You – but altered to keep to the slightly darker tone of the live-action film. I disagreed with some of the voice casting, although Mowgli was well played by his young actor, much closer to Kipling’s stroppy character who wore constantly at the nerves of his predatory guardians, always questioning and quarrelling and winding the animals up.

I had to look up afterwards who voiced Bagheera, which turned out to be Ben Kingsley, because he sounded disturbingly like Ralph Fiennes at times, and I dislike him. Bill Murray voiced Baloo, not quite so jarring, except when he used slang like “cool” that made me wonder what the scriptwriters had been thinking.

Scarlett Johansson managed to carry off a superbly sinister turn on Kaa, who in the books was a powerful figure that terrified the entire jungle, including Bagheera and Baloo when they reluctantly approached him for help rescuing Mowgli from the monkeys. Idris Elba voiced Shere Khan, which I didn’t realise either, because he gave the tiger a voice that wouldn’t be out of place from a sneering football hooligan with a pint of beer in one hand and a bloody-knuckled fist of the other. I preferred the sleekly sinister English accent of the original voice actor, although the burned, blind in one eye Shere Khan of the live action remake was a bit closer to the Kipling original (where he was born with a crippled leg and went by the derogatory nickname Lungri, or “The Lame One”.

King Louie, voiced by Christopher Walken, was reimagined not as an orangutan, which are native to Borneo and not India where the story is set, but as a Gigantopithecus, an extinct species of great ape that had survived in the abandoned temple city inhabited by the monkeys. The monkeys themselves are generally larger than their real-life counterparts, with the stronger enforcers of Louie’s troupe actually the size of adult humans when compared to Mowgli.

All the animals in the film are CGI, conspicuously so, but computer technology has advanced enough that they look closer and closer to real animals and birds, and it’s apparent that huge amounts of studying have gone into the production of the beasts: their bodies, fur, feathers, and muscle structure are all sharply realised. Bagheera was rendered moving exactly as a real melanistic leopard would, with that distinctive cat gait, as was Shere Khan, even when they fought, and I thought this achievement was very impressive. I was also really impressed that they used so many different species of monkey in Louie’s tribe – pig-tailed macaques, hoolock gibbons and grey langurs, rather than just sticking to one generic looking monkey species.