on THE JUNGLE BOOK (2016, 105 minutes, PG)
The Quick of It -
Disney has been on a tear making Live Action
Films of their popular animated archive.
Although THE JUNGLE BOOK took a bit of time before releasing, this film
lives up to the hype and was worth the wait.
Thank you Jon Favreau for continuing your superb directing and
producing.
Mowgli relives this tale with the same plotline
as the original animated movie, which does not follow closely to the book’s
original short story, “Mowgli’s Brothers” (probably a good thing if you ever
had the chance to read). Young actor
Neel Sethi does a great job with both body language and speech quarks to bring
the character to life, while working on sets that are mostly green screen setups. With this project being so heavily CGI,
there had to be a major undertaking in scene coordination to achieve this level
of quality in shooting.
You get the opportunity to experience all those
special moments from your childhood in high-grade CGI. I will admit there were some stumbles in
texture and lighting, which take you briefly out of the film because your eyes
and brain realize something is wrong even though you don’t immediately
understand the ‘why’, but the attention to detail and mimicked animal movement
is astounding.
The voice casting was spot-on. Lupita Nyong’o as Raksha (Mowgli’s mom),
Bill Murray as Baloo, and Ben Kingsley as Bagheera fit the personalities and
made you fall in love with Mowgli’s extended family. The sultry voice of Scarlett Johansson put you under the spell of
Kaa and Christopher Walken crushed it as King Louie as he trounced through the
ruins. But my favorite, and one of the
best villains hands-down, is Idris Elba as Shere Khan. He has ascended to my top five, and that’s
no Joking! (You see what I did
there? Probably not…)
As Disney moves through their collection of
greats, I believe they will have a hard time matching up to the visual success
of THE JUNGLE BOOK. I will admit to
wanting ALADDIN rushed to the forefront but I don’t see a stirring on the
future projects list. We will see soon
enough see if this direction in revamping old titles was a good call on
Disney’s part.
Grade: A-
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