The Jungle Book 2016
I didn’t see The Jungle Book when it came to theaters because I kind of wondered what the point was of remaking a classic Disney animated feature in live action with mostly CGI. But it got very good reviews and I put it on my list of Blu-rays I might like to buy at the Disney Movie Club. While it is mostly the same characters and setup as the original, this is no cartoon, but more of a straight up action/adventure movie that deserves the PG rating with more intensity and violence. It seems like they tried to stay truer to the Rudyard Kipling stories, but this is Disney and they aren’t going to mess too much with people’s fond memories of the original, so you also have King Louie make an appearance even though he was not in the book. And they sort of include two of the songs: “Bare Necessities” and “I Wanna Be Like You” except they probably didn’t feel like in this heavier movie that the characters should break out in song, so they dialed it way down to where Christopher Walken is almost reciting rather than singing King Louie’s song (this is a very different Louie). But since most of the audience knows the higher energy original songs, it feels a little off. And with so much CGI, it can’t always work that well. It is amazing to see this boy co-starring with these realistic looking animals, but at the same time, they are obviously not real and the lighting is always a little suspect. Pretty quickly, you don’t really care. The animated animals of the original didn’t look real either and it doesn’t take away from the story telling. They did a great job of capturing most aspects of the animals, and there are an impressive number of different animals. Even the actor who played Mowgli is good, which is kind of surprising since he is pretty young and everything around him is fake.This movie is probably better than the original: there is more weight, more drama, better realized conflicts and characters, with only the songs being a let-down. It is not as fun, funny, or cartoony as the original, but that is not what they are going for.
Written: 21 Jan 2017
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital