Film Watching The Jungle Book today for the first time in about twenty-five years I was surprised by how simple the narrative structure actually is. After the prologue in which Mowgli is brought up by the wolves (after the implied death of his parents, the background painting of the broken boat as economic a bit of storytelling as you’re likely to see anywhere) it’s largely just about his passage from the jungle to the man village. Almost like a variety show, each of the different animals shows up and does their turn, perhaps with a song, before shuffling off ready for the next one, sometimes collaborating on various tunes. Disney dumped Kipling and the work of original adaptor Bill Peet (who had in mind an adventure film) in favour of a concoction which he thought should favour character over plot.
Usually I get quite annoyed by episodic film structures because done badly they tend to drag; much as I love Time Bandits, it can seem at times like a bunch of television episodes strung together. Film review maverick Mark Kermode jokes that the likes of The Ice Age represent ‘the death of narrative cinema', and it is fairly amazing how many recent releases do set off their characters and premise, noodle about for an hour of incidents before desperate grabbing for a conclusion twenty minutes before the end. Arguably, for all of its innovations, There Will Be Blood does exactly that, with vignettes such as the introduction of his ‘brother’ eminently droppable from the story, no matter how much it apparently says about the main character.
What saves The Jungle Book is the quality of the songs, all of which I know word for word anyway after listening to the record hundreds of times as a kid, and the quality of the character animation – as one contributor notes on the dvd it’s amazing how something drawn can have that much weight and can be giving such a loose and colourful performance. But the story has a metaphoric significance too -- it’s about our own journey from childhood to adulthood, Mowgli leaving the talking animals to join his own people. The girl he meets at the end, sweet and romantic as she is, represents the introduction of responsibility and that makes the climax very sad indeed. Except, since composer George Bruns layers her song, ‘My Own Home’ on the soundtrack right from the beginning, it was inevitable from the opening moments, the music arguably tying the film together more than the script.
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