Jungle Book

Ok. With the 1990's now behind us, jumping back to the late 1960's makes for an almost jarring experience.   This is not to say that this a bad jarring, there is just a much more notable change in how the films come across to me.  It just makes for a slight adjustment on my part.

While normally I would praise a strong opening, with the Jungle Book we get a much more slow, meandering opening primarily as we see the credits over some very pretty backgrounds. During our opening we do eventually meet Bagheera, the panther, and our young hero Mowgli the man-cub who is taken to be raised by a pack of wolves while he is a baby.

The rest of the film that follows very much feels like a tamer, more jungle themed version of Alice in Wonderland. It has a very episodic feeling as we get our opening, we meet the elephant herd twice, Kaa the python visits twice, we get introduced to Baloo, Mowgli is kidnapped by the crazed monkey group and their leader King Louie, and we get our final showdown with Shere Khan who gets a few scenes of his own. Oh and the vultures!

While this sounds like quite a lot and comes across as lacking a good, proper story structure this more episodic manner does allow us to meet a wide variety of awesome characters. The most interesting thing about these characters is that they are quite often in the shady grey region instead of simply being clear cut villains or heroes, Shere Khan and to a lesser extent Kaa. Initially sounding like a shady grey character himself is Bagheera who eventually begins to act more and more like a surrogate father to Mowgli, causing him and his idea of what's best for the boy to clash with that of the more laid back Baloo.

During most of his encounters, Mowgli gets to interact with all of the animals generally through song and more often than not, a sense of danger as well. The songs are quite enjoyable, and as a child I very much enjoyed playing the elephants song over, and over, and over, and over,  and over again just for good measure. Yet for the life of me I barely remember the words now despite having only watched this last night. Alas.

4/5