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| Just like the Coppertone ads! |
Adapting Rudyard Kipling’s collection of Mowgli stories (published in 1894,) original screenwriter Bill Peet chose to keep the story and tone of the script close to Kipling’s original adventure yarn. His changes mostly involved cleaning up the structure (so that Mowgli’s return to the “man village” came at the end of the film) and adding the character of King Louie - a domineering, threatening figure in his draft. Walt Disney, however, had other plans. Having taken a “hand’s-off” approach while tending to other projects around the company, Walt was disappointed with the studio's previous pair of animated films (1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians and 1963’s The Sword in the Stone,) and therefore decided to be more directly involved with their latest effort. Walt’s first order of business was to demand that the story be lightened up, as he felt the script was too dark a film for family audiences. Peet, a longtime “storyman” who’d worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Dumbo, The Three Caballeros, So Dear to My Heart and many others, refused to make the changes Walt insisted on. He pointed out the studio’s legacy of films featuring dark elements that balanced out the light ones; imagine, for example, a Snow White without her flight through the forest or an evil Queen. Walt, however, put his foot down. Peet walked, leaving the studio for good.
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| Bastard from a basket! |
If Walt wanted a bright, chipper film, he certainly got one. Despite a few instances of what can best be described as “light peril,” Disney’s Jungle Book goes down like a sugary soft drink that’s lost it’s fizz. The new script by Larry Clemmons, Walt’s hand-picked replacement for the departed Peet, is as entertaining as it is boiler-plate.
That’s not to say The Jungle Book is a bad movie, of course, just not a great one. There’s much to like, including the performance of it’s voice-cast. Notably, it's here that we first see Disney filling it’s cast with well-known celebrity voices, a practice that would become only too prevalent in the coming years. Though not appearing until more than a third of the way into the film, Phil Harris’ Baloo the Bear steals the whole show - and with good reason. Cast after meeting Walt at a party, the comedian brings a great amount of warmth to Mowgli's mentoring “Papa Bear," like a big cuddly Falstaff. Not to be outdone, musician Louis Prima brings his crazed stage persona to the role of Orangutan King Louie, scat-singing his way through “I Wanna’ Be Like You” with manic abandon (his Curly Howard-like “N’yaar-Raar” growl halfway through the song makes me chuckle every time.) British actor George Sanders makes a late-film impression as the villainous Tiger Shere Khan, whose strong chin was modeled after the actor's own features. Some old friends are here as well, such as Sebastian Cabot playing the Panther Bagheera (the calm center of the film,) and Sterling Holloway, whose sing-song vocal brings a squeamish pedophile-like quality to his performance as the Snake, Kaa. Filling out the cast is the director’s son, Bruce Reitherman, as young Mowgli, and Clint Howard as the little Elephant son of Colonel Hathi (voiced by J. Pat O’Malley.)
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| You want a popsicle? My tree's full of popsicles. |
Upon this most recent viewing, I couldn’t help but notice that all of the “sophisticated” animals - Bagheera, Shere Khan, the Elephants and the Wolves - were all portrayed with British accents. Perhaps a nod to the Imperial rule of Kipling’s time in India, it’s contrasted to the American voices given to such free-wheeling characters as Baloo and King Louie. It’s also noteworthy (if that’s the word) that not a single voice - including that of Mowgli - is provided by an Indian actor (or even given an Indian accent.) Heck, this makes 1994’s The Lion King (with it’s handful of African-American actors amongst the main cast) sound downright progressive in comparison!
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| Baloo's happy ending. |
Many people credit The Jungle Book for it’s lively music, and for the most part I find the songs - penned by Walt’s go-to team of Robert and Richard Sherman - enjoyable, if not especially memorable. The exception is the Phil Harris-sung “Bare Necessities,” which is the real standout. Remarkably this memorable number is the only song not written for the film by the Sherman brothers, but by Terry Gilkyson, who also penned the half-awful title song for The Three Lives of Thomasina - and who was removed from the project along with Bill Peet for writing music that was “too dark” for Walt’s liking. On the other end of the spectrum is the lousy “That’s What Friends Are For,” sung in the film by a foursome of Vultures said to be modeled after The Beatles. If the animators were going for a parody of the “fab four,” however, they ended up with characters that appeared closer to a sitcom’s idea of what a mop-topped “British invasion” group looks like (if you’ve ever seen the the episode of Gilligan’s Island featuring a fake band called The Mosquitos, you’ve got the picture.) The song itself, however, sounds like straight-up barbershop, so I’m really not sure what the filmmakers were going for - ‘cause what they got was crap.
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| Blackbird singing in the dead of night... |
I’d like to make special mention of the score written by George Bruns, whose work for Disney earned him four Academy Award nominations (unfortunately not this film.) Bruns’ use of gently-bowed strings and low woodwinds help to create a brooding sense of mystery that is sadly lacking from the rest of the production. If there are any fans of Exotica music reading (think Tiki bars rather than World Music,) I can’t recommend a listen to Bruns’ album Moonlight Time in Old Hawaii enough. Recorded as one of his many side projects (George Bruns and the Hawaiian Strings,) the album is one of the most evocative examples of the genre I’ve encountered, bettering more popular titles by artists like Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman. Sadly, the album never seems to have made it to CD or digital, so I’ve provided a link to a remastered recording of the original LP in the title (kindly provided by my favorite blogger, FoxxFur.)
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| Dance monkey, dance! |
A favorite film for many, that The Jungle Book is held in such high regard by the general public while similar, concurrent efforts from the studio are looked down on, is a bit mystifying. While not great films, both The Sword in the Stone and 1973’s Robin Hood are funnier, for example. The solidifying of The Jungle Book’s reputation as a “Disney Classic” can be traced back to it’s original release, when 99% of the (largely-positive) reviews all made mention of Walt Disney’s recent death - and were likely carried on the goodwill of the beloved filmmaker’s passing. Over the years, besides being praised for it’s character design and music, the biggest point of discussion regarding the film is that is it was “THE LAST MOVIE WALT DISNEY MADE” - or, more accurately, the last film released that Walt was involved in - or, even more accurately, the last animated movie he was involved in (the actual last film Walt involved himself in was The Happiest Millionaire, but that period-musical is far less perpetually marketable than a talking animal picture.) For me, though, The Jungle Book sits comfortably amidst a period of Disney animation that I like to call the “Saturday morning cartoon” era, when visual spectacle and artistic ambition took a backseat to budget. Partially due to the disappointing returns of 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, as well as the continued cash-drain of both Disneyland and the burgeoning “Florida Project,” the introduction of the time and money-saving xerography process seemed to dictate the overall direction the studio would take for the next two decades.
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| KHAAAAAAAANNNN!!!! |
Perhaps no other individual can best be singled-out as central to the animation studio’s artistic leveling-off than director Wolfgang Reitherman - one of Walt’s so-called “nine old men.” An animator with the company since 1934, “Woolie” rose through the ranks and was promoted to chief animation director, starting with One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Under his direction, the studio’s output became safer, blander, and (mostly) more cost-effective. So afraid of artistic risk was Reitherman that he became a champion of re-using animation; all of the examples of “traced-over” sequences found in The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, The Rescuers and others came as a direct result of Reitherman’s belief that the Disney artists follow what had worked before. Apparently he thought the contemporary animators (many of whom had been at the studio for years) were incapable of animating a Wolf-cub’s walk cycle (having them trace over animation of Dalmatian puppies,) or that Maid Marian should dance exactly like Snow White did in 1937. The infuriating thing about this is that re-drawing the same animation was not only artistically stifling, but also more time-consuming than coming up with new drawings (per interviews with long-time animator Floyd Norman.) The great irony here, of course, is that the more Disney tried to “do it like the past,” the further and further they got away from the artistic heights of their “golden age.”
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| So next time a girl gives you the play, just remember my rhyme and get the hell away |
In all honesty, it’s easy to hang the lazy re-use of animation solely on Reitherman’s shoulders; however to place full responsibility for the studio’s downward spiral on him may be scapegoating. Financial pressures from both within and without the company put a lot of strain on the animation unit, and frankly it’s a minor miracle that the company kept the department running and producing films at all. The bigger disappointment for me is the “make it safe” attitude of Walt Disney himself. By this late point in his life, Walt was a long way from the dynamic young filmmaker who rallied a ragtag group of artists into creating a feature-length animated movie against incredible odds, or who was willing to gamble his company’s financial well-being on an experimental film set to classical music. Walt’s instruction to the Shermans to give their music a “lightness, a ‘Disney’ touch” is as startling as it is disappointing, indicating a man who’d grown to accept the fact that his signature has been bastardized into a corporate logo. No longer focused on the output of his studio, the very bedrock upon which his company was built, Walt’s vision had by this point shifted from visual entertainment to something else. Walt had his dwindling eye set on a goal far loftier than cartoons, or films, or even theme parks - something that would prove to be both revolutionary and ultimately impossible.
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