One of my favourite films as a child was the Disney cartoon of "The Jungle Book", largely because I was so amused by the antics of the singing, dancing animals- I probably knew off by heart all the lyrics to "The Bear Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You"- so I decided to watch this live-action version when it was recently shown on television. Although it is described as a remake of the 1967 film, the plot has been considerably altered.
This film is officially known as "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book", in line with the common nineties practice of prefixing the author's name to the titles of films based on works of literature, a practice which appears to have been adopted for technical copyright reasons but which was often interpreted as a promise that the film would be more faithful to the original text than earlier adaptations had been. Sometimes, as in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", this promise was kept, but in other cases it certainly was not. The so-called "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet", for example, is much more Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" than it is Shakespeare's.
Similarly, "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book" is only loosely based on Kipling's stories. In the original book, and in the cartoon, the hero, Mowgli, was a young boy. Here he is an adult, a sort of Indian Tarzan who has been raised by animals in the jungle after being accidentally lost there as a boy. The villain of the piece, both in Kipling's version and in Disney's, was the savage, man-eating tiger Shere Khan. Here Shere Khan is presented more as a sort of elemental force of nature, the enforcer of the Law of the Jungle, and the real villain is Captain William Boone, a renegade British army officer obsessed with finding a lost city in the jungle where, rumour has it, a vast treasure is waiting to be discovered. As Mowgli is here a Tarzan-figure he has to have his Jane, and one is provided for him in the shape of Kitty Brydon, his childhood sweetheart and the daughter of Boone's commanding officer.
Most of the animals familiar from the cartoon and the original stories are here- not only Shere Khan but also Akela the wolf, Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the bear. Baloo is generally assumed to be a sloth bear, the only species of bear found in the area of central India in which Kipling set his stories, but here he is a brown bear, and Kipling certainly describes him as brown. In the Disney version he was a generic cartoon bear, of no recognisable species. This film also perpetuates a goof which originated in the cartoon by introducing a character not found in Kipling, King Louie, the orang-utan king of the monkeys. (Orang-utans are not found anywhere in India). In this version the animals are seen interacting with the human characters, but they do not speak, and certainly do not sing and dance.
There are certain costume dramas films which reveal more about the period in which they were made than they do about the period in which they are ostensibly made, and this is one of them. The action takes place in the late Victorian or Edwardian era, but the film reflects two of the preoccupations of the late twentieth century, environmentalism and anti-colonialism. Kipling, for whom the "Law of the Jungle" meant preserving the balance of nature (not the dog-eat-dog tyranny of the strong over the weak, which is what the phrase has come to mean today), might have approved of the first concept, but I doubt if he would have had much time for a film set in colonial India in which all the British characters, with the exception of Kitty and the kindly Dr Plumford, are all shown either as villains or as silly asses.
Lack of fidelity to a literary source is not always a bad thing; there have been plenty of films which have played fast-and-loose with their source material and which have nevertheless ended up as good as, or even better than, the original book. The "Jungle Book" cartoon, for example, was hardly faithful to Kipling, but was still one of the best Disney cartons of its era. This live action version is not in the same class. The storyline is a derivative hybrid of Tarzan and Indiana Jones, and the acting was disappointing, with only John Cleese's Plumford standing out. Lena Headey as Kitty lacked the charisma she showed in "Waterland" a couple of years earlier, and Jason Scott Lee as Mowgli looks wrong for the part. If Mowgli is supposed to be Indian, why was a Chinese-Hawaiian cast in the role? If they couldn't find an Indian actor in Hollywood, they should have tried Bollywood.
Although the film was aimed at a family audience it does not really seem suitable for young children, both in terms of levels of violence and in terms of sexual references. (There is a running joke about a soldier who is continually getting kicked in the testicles to a cry of "Ooh, me sweets!"). "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book" is the sort of film that does not really succeed on either level, either as a faithful record of the book or as an adventure film in its own right. More bungle book than jungle book. 5/10
This film is officially known as "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book", in line with the common nineties practice of prefixing the author's name to the titles of films based on works of literature, a practice which appears to have been adopted for technical copyright reasons but which was often interpreted as a promise that the film would be more faithful to the original text than earlier adaptations had been. Sometimes, as in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", this promise was kept, but in other cases it certainly was not. The so-called "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet", for example, is much more Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" than it is Shakespeare's.
Similarly, "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book" is only loosely based on Kipling's stories. In the original book, and in the cartoon, the hero, Mowgli, was a young boy. Here he is an adult, a sort of Indian Tarzan who has been raised by animals in the jungle after being accidentally lost there as a boy. The villain of the piece, both in Kipling's version and in Disney's, was the savage, man-eating tiger Shere Khan. Here Shere Khan is presented more as a sort of elemental force of nature, the enforcer of the Law of the Jungle, and the real villain is Captain William Boone, a renegade British army officer obsessed with finding a lost city in the jungle where, rumour has it, a vast treasure is waiting to be discovered. As Mowgli is here a Tarzan-figure he has to have his Jane, and one is provided for him in the shape of Kitty Brydon, his childhood sweetheart and the daughter of Boone's commanding officer.
Most of the animals familiar from the cartoon and the original stories are here- not only Shere Khan but also Akela the wolf, Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the bear. Baloo is generally assumed to be a sloth bear, the only species of bear found in the area of central India in which Kipling set his stories, but here he is a brown bear, and Kipling certainly describes him as brown. In the Disney version he was a generic cartoon bear, of no recognisable species. This film also perpetuates a goof which originated in the cartoon by introducing a character not found in Kipling, King Louie, the orang-utan king of the monkeys. (Orang-utans are not found anywhere in India). In this version the animals are seen interacting with the human characters, but they do not speak, and certainly do not sing and dance.
There are certain costume dramas films which reveal more about the period in which they were made than they do about the period in which they are ostensibly made, and this is one of them. The action takes place in the late Victorian or Edwardian era, but the film reflects two of the preoccupations of the late twentieth century, environmentalism and anti-colonialism. Kipling, for whom the "Law of the Jungle" meant preserving the balance of nature (not the dog-eat-dog tyranny of the strong over the weak, which is what the phrase has come to mean today), might have approved of the first concept, but I doubt if he would have had much time for a film set in colonial India in which all the British characters, with the exception of Kitty and the kindly Dr Plumford, are all shown either as villains or as silly asses.
Lack of fidelity to a literary source is not always a bad thing; there have been plenty of films which have played fast-and-loose with their source material and which have nevertheless ended up as good as, or even better than, the original book. The "Jungle Book" cartoon, for example, was hardly faithful to Kipling, but was still one of the best Disney cartons of its era. This live action version is not in the same class. The storyline is a derivative hybrid of Tarzan and Indiana Jones, and the acting was disappointing, with only John Cleese's Plumford standing out. Lena Headey as Kitty lacked the charisma she showed in "Waterland" a couple of years earlier, and Jason Scott Lee as Mowgli looks wrong for the part. If Mowgli is supposed to be Indian, why was a Chinese-Hawaiian cast in the role? If they couldn't find an Indian actor in Hollywood, they should have tried Bollywood.
Although the film was aimed at a family audience it does not really seem suitable for young children, both in terms of levels of violence and in terms of sexual references. (There is a running joke about a soldier who is continually getting kicked in the testicles to a cry of "Ooh, me sweets!"). "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book" is the sort of film that does not really succeed on either level, either as a faithful record of the book or as an adventure film in its own right. More bungle book than jungle book. 5/10