The Jungle Book - As Indian movies go the best one so far this year

There’s a great gag doing the rounds right now, that in the race for the Indian box office, a movie with Shere Khan and a couple of songs has gobbled up a movie with two Shah Rukh Khans and no songs, because while #Fan has under-performed - The Jungle Book has shot out the lights!

The times they are a changing and yet the more times change the more they remain the same.

The original The Jungle Book movie is almost fifty years old and I must have been knee high to a grasshopper when I was introduced to Wolfgang Reitherman’s classic cartoon version. 

Hazy memory and all, I still seem to think it was probably the first movie I saw in a darkened cinema (which goes a long way to explain my magical relationship with a screen lighting up) – and thru time I have owned a copy in virtually every format from VHS to DVD.

The animation back then was nowhere near as slick as it is today, but the joy of watching it, and it’s magical aura has never dated.

It’s the characters that evoke such feelings; the unbridled happiness of Baloo, the eeriness of Kaa, the wisdom of Bagheera, the menace of Shere Khan and the charming impishness of the man-cub Mowgli with his inquisitive mind - and a cute nose for trouble. And who can forget those bored Beatle inspired vultures with their mop tops, who kept asking each other the same annoying question “ere wot you wanna do!”  

Today the animation looks dated and yet the movie retains its disarming charm. The six songs by the Sherman Brothers are as catchy today as they were back then, and the one song that those brothers didn’t compose remains the most memorable of the lot, how The bare necessities of life will come to you, a Terry Gilkyson composition didn’t win the Oscar for best song is puzzling, it is an all-time classic!

Get this - that 1967 movie cost Disney $4million to make and its box office return to date is around $206m which doesn’t even take into account the thousands of VHS tapes, DVDs etc. that have been sold.

The thing about the original is that while it was well loved, it was criticized for not being true to the dark and sinister Rudyard Kipling series of stories on which it was based.

The Jungle Book was the last film that Walt Disney himself worked on before his death and legend has it that after ditching his first script writer who he thought was being too sincere to the book, he gave Larry Clemmons the responsibility of rewriting it. 
He also presented Clemmons with a copy of Kipling’s book and advised him not to read it, just to use the characters and to have fun with it - and oh what fun they had.     

That fun element is apparent in this new version, which starts just like the original did... Buena Vista logo usurped into a green dense jungle..but there is a darker more sinister side that makes it more thrilling. 

And although the animal kingdom is more real, the character’s personalities match the original fun versions; the lovable oaf Baloo voiced by Bill Murray, the world wise Bhageera (Ben Kingsley), Shere Khan filled with a menacing ferocity by Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson’s  hypnotic ssssscene sssssstealing Kaa, and the maternal instincts of the mother wolf Raksha (Lupita Nyongo’o) and then there’s the man cub Mowgli the only real actor in the movie played with impish charm by Neel Sethi.  

Considering he is the one living actor in a movie filled with computer generated characters, it is quite a feat as to how well director Jon Favreau manages to hook and immerse one into this new Jungle Book, turning it into one great big rollicking adventure. The film like its predecessor is a tribute to life in an Indian jungle and as long as those jungles are preserved, our fascination with them and with the wild will never cease to exist. 

Favreau slips in some strong environmental messages; agreement to share water during a drought, the protection of territories, honouring the jungle hierarchy, and the mistrust that beast has towards man but most of all he makes a movie that has the enchanting Disney brand of magic to it.

Pity its already off Imax because it really is a beast of a movie, the kind you want to experience rather than watch, and as Indian movies go - sorry Shah Rukh Khan but frame for frame Shere Khan’s movie is the best one I’ve seen all year.  

P.S. I think it'll be worth buying the Blu Ray / DVD when it comes out as there is a dubbed Hindi version featuring Priyanka Chopa (Kaa), Irrfan Khan (Baloo), Om Puri (Bagheera) and Nana Patekar (Shere Khan).