The Jungle Book (2016)
Directed by Jon Favreau
After a threat from the tiger Shere Khan, Mowgli, a man-cub fostered by wolves, is forced to flee the jungle, and he embarks on a journey of self-discovery with the help of the panther, Bagheera, and the free-spirited bear, Baloo.
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42 films that influenced The Jungle Book
What critics say influenced The Jungle Book
When Christopher Walken’s power-hungry giant ape King Louie appears in the shadowed interior of a crumbling ruin, rubbing his temple precisely like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” it’s a brilliant moment of suspense and a superb inside joke.
Bagheera escorts Mowgli through the jungle on what proves to be an arduous journey, as they encounter the seductive python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson), who views Mowgli as a delectable treat, as well as the gigantic orangutan King Louis (Christopher Walken, channeling Marlon Brando from "Apocalypse Now"), who wants the boy to bring him fire for his own use.
There’s also King Louie (Christopher Walken), a hulking orangutan who’s a cross between the Godfather and Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now.”
The Jungle Book, Disney’s latest live action take on one of their animated classics, actually contains sly nods to Apocalypse Now and Saturday Night Live.
And then there’s Christopher Walken doing his Christopher Walken thing as King Louie, the grotesque and oversized orangutan who “welcomes” Mowgli into his dark and forbidding lair with all the oily menace of Colonel Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” Walken’s rendition of “I Wan’na Be Like You,” made famous by Louis Prima in the 1967 film, might be amusing to adults (I found it a bit tedious) but will most likely have children fidgeting with their 3-D glasses, waiting for the story to get moving again.
If the inspiration comes from such movies as “Life of Pi” and the recent adaptation of “Planet of the Apes”, then “The Jungle Book” is the advanced level.
Just four years ago, the Bengal tiger in “Life of Pi” was a jaw-dropping creation.
Working far from the jungle in a building in downtown Los Angeles, Favreau and his VFX team have built a fantasy world to rival James Cameron's in Avatar and Ang Lee's in Life of Pi.
Yet after a while, I stopped caring about how the filmmakers achieved such visual plausibility and sumptuousness, which is on par with, if not better than, recent effects-driven triumphs "Life of Pi" and "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes."
Completamente filmada en estudios de casa en Los Ángeles, The Jungle Book nos presenta el avance en VFX más significativo en la industria desde que filmes como Avatar, Life of Pi y Rise/Dawn Planet of the Apes lo hicieron.
The density and detail of the jungle are rendered sensuously by digital effects experts culled in part from the teams behind Gravity, Life of Pi and Avatar, and by the cinematographer Bill Pope.
It's enthralling to be dropped into the middle of the virtual sets and look around at them, at any rate, and the film earns the ever-loving hell out of the upcharge to 3-D; not since Avatar has a film Avatar'd this well.
(Think “Babe” meets “The Life of Pi” meets “Avatar.”)
Untethered by reality, its settings are huge, its cliffs and waterfalls like something out of James Cameron’s Avatar.
But not enough to diminish the brilliance and craftsmanship that went into a movie that makes the CGI jungle in “Avatar” look amateurish.
Like “Avatar” before it, this CG and live-action interpretation of Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale of a boy raised by wolves feels like a momentous occasion in the technical advancements of big-budget cinema.
Favreau and his team then used a camera system known as Simulcam, which was developed for Avatar, to capture, in real time, CG environments superimposed on a physical production set, allowing filmmakers to see exactly how something would look on-screen and then make the necessary tweaks on the spot, meaning every aspect of the image, organic or otherwise, could align and interact with perfect precision.
The last word goes to Favreau, whose best work (“Iron Man” and “Elf”) has arguably been associated with those films’ lead actors more than the director.
Working from a screenplay by Justin Marks, director Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) has a sure feel for what’s required, and in Sethi he has a young actor who’s engaging without being cutesy.
The film is a passion project that Favreau has been working toward throughout his career, starting as an indie darling by writing and starring in "Swingers" and moving into the big time with the family classic "Zathura," the blockbuster "Iron Man" films and even the technically impressive but flaccid "Cowboys and Aliens."
The director is Jon Favreau, a congenial figure who stopped the first two “Iron Man” films from rusting up.
Tras el notable éxito comercial (y artístico) de su actualización en imagen real de Cenicienta (Kenneth Branagh, 2015), los estudios Disney se vieron alentados, al fin, a poner en pie una superproducción de mastodóntico presupuesto y con los últimos avances en el campo de efectos digitales puestos al alcance del realizador de las dos taquilleras primeras entregas de Iron Man –también de algún descalabro como Cowboys & Aliens (2011)–, ya un experto en manejar grandes producciones.
This film rates a B. Kudos to director Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”).
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Obviously 1967’s animated The Jungle Book is the main inspiration for this Disney extravaganza, but its creative forebearer is actually 1942’s Bambi .
The Jungle Book has its moments of darkness and it fits in perfectly with Disney’s brutal tradition of shedding parents and parental figures; you can hear the gun shot from Bambi still ringing throughout The Jungle Book .
The film starts with a scary chase, fills out its middle with a couple of killings, throws in a catastrophe or two and ends with a wildfire to rival the one in "Bambi."
He points out homages--sometimes they're to non-Disney movies (Shere Khan's entrance is a nod to A Man for All Seasons ), sometimes they're merely oblique (yes, Mowgli picks up the cowbell in King Louie's lair as a tribute to Christopher Walken)--and paints a generally appetizing portrait of the challenging but harmonious production.
These story elements help make the world of The Jungle Book more than just an exotic setting; it’s a cultural world unto itself, with broad rules and local subcultures, like the farmyard world of Babe or the leporine world of Watership Down .
If parts of the film seem to have drawn on the likes of The Lion King, it’s little surprise that Disney has learned from itself over the years.
Other obvious inspirations include Rudyard Kipling's 1890s stories and, no less crucial, Disney's 1994 smash "The Lion King."
Several shots are designed after some of the most iconic images of the genre—Mufasa’s final scene in The Lion King, the chicken-sized Compy dinosaurs who get the best of Peter Stormare in The Lost World— all helping to combine familiar stories with new technologies, tapping into our nostalgia and repurposing it on a grander scale.
The character has received many comparisons to Scar from “The Lion King” and it’s not unwarranted, but Idris Elba has been on this unstoppable roll ever since last year’s “Beasts of No Nation.”
Almost all Disney animation before The Lion King has some kind of outside source, be it an oft-retold fairy tale or a specific book, and the reintroduction of some additional Kipling into this new Jungle Book makes sense in that context.
Elba’s ferocious, revenge-minded feline in particular is as sinister as Scar from The Lion King.
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He plays the monstrous, prehistoric gigantopithecus King Louie like a Marlon Brando pastiche, somewhere between Apocalypse Now (which The Jungle Book subtly references during his first appearance) and The Godfather .
The 1967 Jungle Book was one of the first animated films not only to feature stars among its voice cast but to use them partly as inspiration for the look of the characters: there was barely a whisker’s difference between George Sanders in All About Eve and the same actor as the tiger Shere Khan.