D52 Week 19: The Jungle Book!

Something this project has made me actually stop and consider, for the first time, is just how utterly random Disney's taste in books to adapt really is! Yes, of course the fairy tale adaptations make sense. But then you wonder, for instance, why one would choose to adapt something like The Hundred and One Dalmatians instead of, say, all sorts of infinitely more notable novels. Or why you'd try to make a movie out of Dumbo, a Roll-a-Book with only a couple lines of text. Looking to the future, you have to wonder why Disney looked to the picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson for the big screen, when that would entail creating, like, 95% of the story from scratch. And here, this week, we have the oddity of a film based on a book that was so very committed to just being a book that it went as far as to have the word "book" RIGHT IN ITS NAME.

That's not the only weird thing about it, of course. (Yes, I'm well aware that I say "of course" entirely too much. I guess it's a nervous tic.) I haven't read Rudyard Kipling's original, but eeeeeveryone knows that it has absolutely nothing in common tonally with this movie. It's perfectly understandable that Waltie wanted to make a light-hearted film for the kiddies! (I know, I won't be able to blame him for these things anymore soon.) It's less understandable why he'd choose to make it out of one of the darkest, most intense pieces of children's literature he probably could've picked, then throw original screenwriter Bill Peet and composer Terry Gilkyson to the wolves when they tried to adapt that piece of literature by....actually making something similar to it. It's just such a strange situation, when you think about it! That doesn't change the fact that the final product is pretty solid, though.

It continues the grand Disney tradition of having a really uninteresting main character, though. (Was 101 Dalmatians the only recent occasion where I actually liked the main character?) Surely this trend will get better in time, but...not today. For literally being raised by wolves, Mowgli really isn't terribly wolflike, is he? He sure seems curiously well-adjusted for a feral child, anyway. Amala or Kamala, he certainly isn't! Were the popular standards of proper child behaviour this late in the 1960s still so very strict and rigid that Mowgli was "wild" by comparison? Sure, he boxes a freakin' bear, but it's probably the chillest bear one could possibly engage in fisticuffs, so....so what? All he really does is just refuse to return to the Man Village for just long enough to traumatize an already deeply troubled tiger; what a guy! (What makes him return to the Man Village? A wo-man, obviously!)

Part of the reason for that seems, by this point, to be an inherent quality of Disney's more episodic films. I'm reminded of Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, and last week's The Sword in the Stone, where the emphasis is on the situations our protagonist encounters and the people he or she meets, for better or worse. What is it about this sort of story structure that necessitates a bland main character? Well.....nothing, nothing at all; alas, nobody told them. So, movies like this really live or die on the interestingness of the side characters, and I suppose The Jungle Book gets to live. (I'm so generous!) Kaa, for instance, is just a great character, with some of the most convincing animated slithering ever committed to film, and great voice acting that manages to be genuinely creepy despite pretty much just being Winnie-the-Pooh with a lisp. (Speaking of which, Baloo is clearly a closeted homosexual, but let's not get into that too terribly much okay?)

It's odd just how many of these characters are completely irrelevant, though! What does Colonel Hathi do, really? Not a whole lot. (Certainly not enough to get a Parisian pizza outpost named after him.) And the point of King Louie and his army of monkeys, who for some reason have an ape as their king? Their conditional promise to help Mowgli stay in the jungle is pointless, because it's not like anyone ever particularly bothers considering fulfilling those conditions at all! Well, I suppose it WAS important to shoehorn in an appearance by the second most famous Louis they could reasonably use. But, y'know what? I find it fairly easy to forgive this film for the fact that over half of what happens therein has nothing to do with anything at all. The Sherman Brothers wrote the songs! The Sherman Brothers are awesome! The music is ridiculously catchy! This definitely counts for something!

I want to devote special attention to how utterly bizarre the stuff with the vultures is. Okay, so Mowgli is an outcast by this point. And nobody likes vultures, so I guess they're kind of like nature's gross necrophile outcasts. And outcasts and outcasts make reasonable friends. So, okay, this makes sense so far. But the vultures are The Beatles, basically? Vultures, of all creatures? What? They were even originally supposed to be PLAYED by The Beatles, but then John Lennon was John Lennon and that's the end of that. But that would've been relatively cool stunt casting, right? So I suppose I get why they'd do that. And, as The Vulture Beatles, surely their musical number is a clever little Britpop song that- oh, wait, no, it's actually more of a barbershop quartet song? The Beatles WERE the world's foremost barbershop quartet, after all! It's not that it's a bad sequence or anything, but....it's just so weird!!

It's also sort of a bizarre coincidence that the vultures, the totally dreamy mop-topped omens of death, pop up in what happened to be the last film Walt Disney personally had a hand in. It's a definite end of an era; fortunately, said era goes out on a pleasantly solid film. It's uneven, it's sort of disconnected, but it's ultimately really quite charming, and in that respect it's fittingly representative of this era of the studio's life as a whole. Which is to say, I liked it. It's a pretty easy film to like!

...unless you're Bill Peet or Terry Gilkyson. They had every right to bitterly hate this.

(You'd be horrified if you knew how much time I spent on this.)

TERRIBLY USELESSLY UNNECESSARY ABANDONED DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT OF THE WEEK: In The Jungle Book III: The Wrath of Shere Khan, Mowgli and Whatshername and The Other Guy have decided to leave the politically correct renamed Person Village to live in the jungle, because the divisiveness of human society just can't compare to the harmonious unity of the jungle animals, or something. Obviously, Shere Khan is less than thrilled. He kidnaps King Larry's top monkey scientists and forces them to construct a time machine for him. He then uses this time machine to travel back in time to the days where everyone was still an adorable jungle cub, with the intention of causing a rift between them that would last a lifetime, thus preventing Mowgli from wanting to move back. And, for awhile, his plan is working! In the present, Mowgli and his friends begin to fade out of existence (?), prompting Baloo (now played by George Wendt) to put the pieces together and realise what must be done. Baloo forces the monkey scientists to build another time machine so he, too, can go back in time, where he tracks down modern-day Shere Khan and takes him to see Younger Shere Khan. This reminds Shere Khan that he, too, used to be everybody's fwiend - and, as such, so too must he be everyone's friend in the present. To celebrate his realization, everyone sings along to a begrudgingly catchy mid-nineties hip-hoppish version of "Bare Necessities", naturally. Yeah buddy!