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the jungle book review in english

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I saw the newest Disney version of "The Jungle Book" in the company of my enthralled 12-year-old son, and there were moments when I envied him—but not too many, because the film is so surefooted in its effects, so precise and simple in its characterizations, and so clear about what it's trying to say about the relationship between humanity and nature, that it made me feel about his age again, too. Maybe younger.

From the opening sequence of young Mowgli ( Neel Sethi ) racing through the jungle in the company of his adoptive wolf family and his feline guardian, the black panther Bagheera ( Ben Kingsley ), through its comic setpieces with the layabout Baloo the Bear ( Bill Murray ) and its sinister interludes with the python Kaa ( Scarlett Johansson ), the despot orangutan King Louie ( Christopher Walken ), and the scarred Bengal tiger Shere Khan ( Idris Elba ), the movie bears you along on a current of enchantment, climaxing in a thunderous extended action sequence that dazzles while tying off every lingering plot point, and gathering up all the bits of folklore, iconography, and Jungian dream symbols that have been strewn throughout the story like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs.

It's not accurate to call this "Jungle Book" a "live-action" version, since so much of it has been generated on a computer. But screenwriter Justin Marks , director Jon Favreau and their hundreds of collaborators render such distinctions moot. Combining spectacular widescreen images of rain forests, watering holes and crumbling temples, a couple of human actors, and realistic mammals, birds and reptiles that nevertheless talk, joke and even sing in celebrity voices, the movie creates its own dream-space that seems at once illustrated and tactile. It's the sort of movie you might inadvertently dream about after re-reading one of Rudyard Kipling's source books or re-watching the 1967 animated Disney film, both of which contributed strands of this one's creative DNA.

The Disney animated version was the last cartoon feature personally overseen by Walt Disney , and its release one year after his death marked the start of a period of creative wandering for the company (though other features that had been in development for years, most of them lackluster, would appear throughout the decade that followed). Like a lot of the company's 1960s and '70s output, it was relaxed to a fault—a succession of beautifully rendered, mostly jokey set-pieces strung together by memorable songs, including "The Bare Necessities," "I Wanna Be Like You" and the python’s seduction song "Trust in Me"—but it still made a deep impression on '60s and '70s kids like the 49-year-old Favreau. This incarnation is a more straightforward telling that includes just two brief, according-to-Hoyle musical numbers, "The Bare Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You"—performed by Sethi with Murray and Walken, respectively. It relegates a longer version of the ape's song and a torch-song-y version of "Trust in Me," performed by Johansson, to the approximately seven-minute end credits sequence, which is so intricately imagined as to be worth the ticket price by itself. Other numbers, including the elephants' marching song and "That's What Friends Are For," performed by a barbershop quartet of mop-topped vultures, are MIA, presumably in the interest of pacing.

I mention all this not because I consider the film's lack of music a shortcoming, but because it gives some indication of how gracefully this "Jungle Book" juggles the competing interests of parents and kids. Musically, visually and tonally, there are enough nods to the 1967 version to satisfy nostalgia buffs, but not so many that the film becomes a glorified rehash. Kipling's tales are a stronger influence, down to the scenes where the wolves, Mowgli and other creatures recite a stripped-down version of Kipling's poem " The Law of The Jungle " ("...For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf/and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack"). And there are nods to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories and the masterful comics illustrator Burne Hogarth's adaptations , which seem to have influenced the way the movie's CGI artists render the movie's trees: as gnarled, knuckled, pretzel-twisted, vine-shrouded wonders, rising from the forest floor.

The film creates its own, more politically evolved version of Kipling's literary ecosystem, with its ancient animal beliefs and practices, such as predators and prey declaring a "water truce" during a drought so that they can all drink unmolested from a parched watering hole. And it invests Mowgli with a touch of optimistic environmentalist fantasy: where human mastery of fire and tools was presented in earlier films as a threat, and Mowgli's fated exit from the jungle as an unfortunate necessity, in this film the boy is shown using his ingrained ingenuity to solve problems beyond the capabilities of his animal pals, as when he builds a rappel and pulley system to help Baloo claim honey from a cliffside beehive he's been coveting. The idea here seems to be that humanity is not necessarily fated to subjugate and destroy nature. People and animals can live in harmony if we behave with kindness and mercy while showing reverence for the ancients of other species, like the elephants that Bagheera credits with creating the rain forest and directing the flow of water by digging canals with their hooves and tusks.

The movie takes these ideas and others seriously, but in a matter of fact way, so that they don't feel clumsily superimposed, but rather discovered within a text that has existed for more than a century. Kingsley's unhurried storybook narration hypnotizes the audience into buying everything Favreau shows us, as surely as Johansson's Kaa voice-work hypnotizes Mowgli. (The latter sequence includes one of the new movie's most extraordinary embellishments: as Mowgli stares into one of Kaa's eyes, he sees his own origin story play out within it.)

Another kind of balancing act is happening in the voice actors' performances. Favreau leans on distinctive-sounding stars to earn knowing chuckles from the audience, and lets some of their familiar physical and facial tics seep into the animal "performances": Murray is a shambling pleasure-seeker in life as well as in many of his movie roles. Walken is legendarily good at playing funny-scary villains who love to mess with heroes' minds (he's merged here with Marlon Brando's performance as Kurtz in " Apocalypse Now ," entering the story swathed in Rembrandt gloom). Kingsley has aged into one of the cinema's great mentor figures. And so on.

But the film is never content to use our affection for its voice actors as a storytelling crutch. These are strong, simple, clearly motivated characters, not movie star cameos wrapped in CGI fur. The most impressive is Elba's Khan. His loping menace is envisioned so powerfully that he'd be scary no matter what, but the character becomes a great villain through imaginative empathy. As was the case with Magua in Michael Mann's " The Last of the Mohicans " and General Zod in " Man of Steel ," we understand and appreciate his point-of-view even though carrying it out would mean the death of Mowgli.

In every way, this quietly majestic film should be considered a triumph. The familiar, picaresque story of a young boy raised by forest creatures but fated to re-join Man has been re-imagined as a funny, scary, affecting family adventure with mythic heft but a refreshing lack of swagger. It was made with the latest in movie-making technology but has the ethical values and wide-net storytelling sensibility of an Old Hollywood classic. At its best it feels as though it always existed and we are only now discovering it.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The Jungle Book movie poster

The Jungle Book (2016)

Rated PG for some sequences of scary action and peril.

105 minutes

Neel Sethi as Mowgli

Bill Murray as Baloo (voice)

Ben Kingsley as Bagheera (voice)

Idris Elba as Shere Khan (voice)

Lupita Nyong'o as Raksha

Scarlett Johansson as Kaa (voice)

Christopher Walken as King Louie (voice)

Giancarlo Esposito as Akela (voice)

Emjay Anthony as Gray (voice)

Sara Arrington as Nilgai Mother

  • Jon Favreau
  • Justin Marks

Writer (book)

  • Rudyard Kipling

Cinematographer

  • Mark Livolsi
  • John Debney

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Neel Sethi as Mowgli in The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book review – spectacular revival of Disney's family favourite

Hyperreal digital animation meets old-fashioned storytelling in this faithful remake, which loses the songs but brings new, ingenious twists on the original

W hat on earth is the point of remaking Walt Disney’s great and possibly greatest masterpiece, the glorious animated musical from 1967, based on Kipling’s tales, all about the “man cub” Mowgli, brought up by wolves in the Indian jungle – famously the last film to get Disney’s personal touch? A remake which furthermore leaves old-fashioned animation behind, departing for the live-action uncanny valley of hyperreal CGI, which heretically loses most of the songs and which also abandons the original’s final, unforgettably exotic glimpse of a real-life human girl?

Well, no point really … other than simply to create a terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun. It handsomely revives the spirit of Disney’s original film, while also having something of old-school family movies about animals like The Incredible Journey (1963) – it almost feels like something I could have watched as a kid on TV. Yet also, weirdly, there’s a touch of Mel Gibson’s jungle nightmare Apocalypto (2006).

Perhaps most strikingly of all, it re-imports into the story elements of the Disney classic The Lion King (1994) which The Jungle Book influenced in the first place: there’s a special rock for the animals to gather round, a stampede scene and an evil feline with a facial disfigurement.

Newcomer Neel Sethi plays Mowgli himself; Ben Kingsley voices Bagheera the panther; Idris Elba is the evil tiger Shere Khan; Scarlett Johansson is the hissing snake mesmerist Kaa; Christopher Walken is the voice of King Louie the fire-hungry ape and inevitably – but pleasingly, and very amusingly – Bill Murray is an outstanding vocal turn as the notorious ursine slacker and pleasure-seeker Baloo the bear who teaches Mowgli the importance of kicking back and enjoying the bare necessities of life.

I’ve never seen digital rendering of talking animals look so persuasive and this film also creates witty and ingenious twists on the story we all know, including a new plot development concerning wolf-leader Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) and Shere Khan – and even creates a backstory for Mowgli which explains how he got that modesty-preserving loincloth of his.

It’s not a musical and yet the deployment of two famous songs – The Bare Necessities and I Wanna Be Like You – feels easy and natural. Actually, the film emphatically revives Kipling’s poem The Law of the Jungle with its collective all-for-one ethic: “The strength of the pack is the wolf/And the strength of the wolf is the pack.” Baloo prefers songs to poems and calls that one “propaganda”.

Interestingly, where the first film finally sticks to a never-the-twain-shall-meet attitude to humans’ long-term cohabitation with animals, this one posits the idea of living together happily (though that size of loincloth can’t last for ever). As I said, this sacrifices the original’s bittersweet acknowledgment that Mowgli must one day grow up and look for romance.

But what a tremendous success this is. The Jungle Book 2.0 is the unexpected treat of the week.

  • The Jungle Book
  • Walt Disney Company
  • Rudyard Kipling
  • Film adaptations
  • Ben Kingsley
  • Scarlett Johansson

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The Jungle Book

Bill Murray, Christopher Walken, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, Lupita Nyong'o, and Neel Sethi in The Jungle Book (2016)

After a threat from the tiger Shere Khan forces him to flee the jungle, a man-cub named Mowgli embarks on a journey of self discovery with the help of panther Bagheera and free-spirited bear... Read all After a threat from the tiger Shere Khan forces him to flee the jungle, a man-cub named Mowgli embarks on a journey of self discovery with the help of panther Bagheera and free-spirited bear Baloo. After a threat from the tiger Shere Khan forces him to flee the jungle, a man-cub named Mowgli embarks on a journey of self discovery with the help of panther Bagheera and free-spirited bear Baloo.

  • Jon Favreau
  • Justin Marks
  • Rudyard Kipling
  • Bill Murray
  • Ben Kingsley
  • 657 User reviews
  • 417 Critic reviews
  • 77 Metascore
  • 33 wins & 56 nominations total

Trailer #1

  • (as Brighton Rose)

Emjay Anthony

  • All cast & crew
  • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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The Jungle Book

Did you know

  • Trivia One of the treasures in King Louie's temple is the Genie's lamp from Aladdin (1992) .
  • Goofs After Mowgli is stung by bees, his stings completely disappear when walking through the woods in the next shot.

Raksha : [to Mowgli] Never forget this: You're mine. Mine to me. No matter where you go, or what they may call you, you will always be my son.

  • Crazy credits The film ends with the Jungle Book storybook closing shut, in a parallel to The Jungle Book (1967) starting with this book opening. Part of the closing credits are seen within this book, with King Louie singing "I Wanna Be Like You" during the sequence.
  • Connections Featured in Annoying Orange: Trailer Trashed: The Jungle Book (2015)
  • Soundtracks The Bare Necessities Written by Terry Gilkyson Produced by Tracey Freeman Performed by Bill Murray and Neel Sethi

User reviews 657

  • Apr 7, 2016
  • What is 'The Jungle Book' about?
  • Is 'The Jungle Book' based on a book?
  • Should I see the original Disney version first?
  • April 15, 2016 (United States)
  • United Kingdom
  • United States
  • New Zealand
  • Official Facebook
  • Official Site
  • Cậu Bé Rừng Xanh
  • Los Angeles, California, USA
  • Walt Disney Pictures
  • Fairview Entertainment
  • Moving Picture Company (MPC)
  • See more company credits at IMDbPro
  • $175,000,000 (estimated)
  • $364,001,123
  • $103,261,464
  • Apr 17, 2016
  • $967,724,775

Technical specs

  • Runtime 1 hour 46 minutes
  • Dolby Digital
  • Dolby Atmos
  • 12-Track Digital Sound
  • Dolby Surround 7.1
  • D-Cinema 96kHz Dolby Surround 7.1

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Bill Murray, Christopher Walken, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, Lupita Nyong'o, and Neel Sethi in The Jungle Book (2016)

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The Jungle Book Reviews

the jungle book review in english

But for a visual experience and for something new I definitely recommend seeing Jungle Book. I think you will really enjoy it.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 27, 2023

the jungle book review in english

... offers far more than the bare necessities as it combines Kipling's stories and Walt Disney's 1967 animated musical adaptation for a marvelous new version of the classic story of a boy quite literally raised by wolves.

Full Review | Sep 22, 2023

the jungle book review in english

Ferocity steps ahead of frolic and you might ask yourself how you feel about that when you watch "The Jungle Book."

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 4, 2023

the jungle book review in english

The Jungle Book is a fun, brisk and absolutely gorgeous achievement that honors the past while looking unflinchingly into the future.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2023

the jungle book review in english

As grating as this trend of remakes can be, Disney knew exactly how to make this one work as well as it could.

Full Review | May 27, 2023

the jungle book review in english

While it has been years since I’ve seen the original, Favreau’s freshened up version pulls just as much from Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 stories as the animated feature.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 22, 2022

the jungle book review in english

Even though it's strange to watch incredibly realistic-looking animals speak like the cartoons in Disney's original, the undeniable visual majesty of Favreau's film overcomes any skepticism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 15, 2022

the jungle book review in english

Beautifully crafted and artfully acted, The Jungle Book's reimagining takes the audience deep into (..) a darkly fantastic and kaleidoscopic tale of bravery and courage.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 9, 2021

the jungle book review in english

...the digital wizardry performed by the filmmakers just might have us believing that the animals are real, too...

Full Review | Aug 27, 2021

the jungle book review in english

In much the same manner as Kenneth Branagh's enchanting Cinderella last year, director Jon Favreau and scripter Justin Marks have crafted a film that manages to pay tribute both to the original tale as well as its animated adaptation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 18, 2021

Bill Murray as Baloo - amazing. Scarlett Johansson - as Kaa - ace. Idris Elba as Sheer Khan - classic.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2021

the jungle book review in english

The environments are so exquisite that it's difficult to remember that a narrative ought to be surfacing from time to time.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 5, 2020

the jungle book review in english

A beautiful film featuring imagery that one could easily describe as lifelike and remarkable in its detail, coloring, shades and physicality.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 13, 2020

the jungle book review in english

The Jungle Book is a magical and immersive film, yet not without its flaws.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

the jungle book review in english

Admittedly, it is a children's movie with beautiful visual detail, but it seems that Favreau went overboard, because it adopts naturalistic charm over narrative substance. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 26, 2020

the jungle book review in english

The Jungle Book is special. A "kid's movie" isn't expected to display such craftsmanship and heart. It's not supposed to stick with you.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

the jungle book review in english

The Jungle Book offers an updated, colorful, vivid and darker remake of the beloved cartoon classic.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2020

the jungle book review in english

Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book is a stunning achievement in filmmaking and a truly memorable film...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 22, 2020

the jungle book review in english

The Jungle Book is not quite as inessential as last year's Cinderella, but ultimately it still fails to justify its own existence.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2020

the jungle book review in english

Director Jon Favreau's beautifully animated 3D production of Rudyard Kipling's classic story is the best yet. This film is sure to become another Disney classic.

Full Review | Oct 16, 2019

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The Jungle Book

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Director Jon Favreau conjures up a magical place to get lost in. And that’s just one of the dazzling delights in The Jungle Book, a visual marvel that cuts a direct path to the heart. Favreau, the director of films as diverse as Elf, Iron Man and Chef, has managed to blend what’s best in the jungle stories of Rudyard Kipling and the 1967 animated Disney version into something unique and unforgettable. See it in reach-out-and-touch 3D if you can, and prepare to be wowed.

Ready-for-anything newcomer Neel Sethi — the only human in a cast of talking computer-generated animals,  plays Mowgli, a 10-year-old man-cub. After the murder of his father, Mowgli is found in the jungle of India by the panther Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley) and left in the care of wolf parents, Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o) and Akela (Giancarlo Esposito). A water shortage has persuaded different species of animals to come together in peace and sharing. The truce is disrupted by the hostile Shere Khan, a Bengal tiger growled by Idris Elba in a voice guaranteed to induce fear and trembling. Blinded in one eye by fire, the “red flower” that the tiger blames on man, Shere Khan demands that the wolfpack turn over Mowgli to him for certain death. After a tearful farewell to his mother (Nyong’o speaks the role with touching gravity), Mowgli — with Bagheera keeping a watchful eye — sets out to connect with a tribe of humans he’s never known.

Scary, yes, but also thrilling. That’s because Favreau, screenwriter Justin Marks, cinematographer Bill Pope ( The Matrix ) and a miraculous special-effects team have made everything so vivid and vibrantly alive. Image and sound design reach new heights as Mowgli moves into the darkness. The mouth movements of the creatures, from ape to turtle, are appealingly natural in the manner of the talking pig in Babe. Be on the lookout for Kaa, a giant python so seductively hissed by Scarlett Johansson that it takes a while to realize she’s just warming up Mowgli up for the kill.

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Just when we get hungry for laughs, there’s Baloo, a lazy hustler of a bear given voice by the incomparable Bill Murray . Baloo helps restore the good-natured, hibernating, honey-slurping, fat-slob sauciness to a mammal that took a hit for turning Leonardo DiCaprio into a chew toy in The Revenant. Murray is pricelessly funny, especially dueting with Mowgli on “The Bare Necessities,” the Oscar-nominated ditty from the Disney cartoon. We also get a song from Christopher Walken who croons “I Wan’na Be Like You” to Mowgli in the role of King Louie, a gigantopithecus who rivals Kong’s role as king of the jungle. No one combines mirth and menace like Walken, whose looks begin to fuse with Louie’s to uncanny effect.

The Jungle Book weaves its way to a happy ending without getting dragged down in the mire of silliness and soppy sentiment. Favreau earns giggles and sniffles through the warm humor he brings to the story. The natural bounce in Sethi’s performance is echoed in the film. There’s nothing cynical about Favreau’s approach to the material.  You get the feeling that he’s having as much fun as we are. 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. Favreau’s Jungle Book fills us with something rare in movies today — a sense of wonder.

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