BEFORE: I'm not making plans to rush out and see "The Lion King" this summer, or even "Aladdin", the other (misidentified) "live-action" remake of a Disney animated film. Heck, I didn't go out to see "Dumbo" this year, either. Points to DisneyCo. for being the ultimate recycler, though - eventually they'll update every film in their library, then it will be interesting to see if they're going to create any new material, or just start over again with a 3-D holo version of "Snow White". I'll catch these films later on as they become available, either on screeners or on cable. I waited probably a whole extra year to watch the revamped "Beauty & The Beast" on Netflix.
But today's film is a different kind of recycling, it's another adaptation of "The Jungle Book" that was planned by another non-Disney studio for release in 2016, only then the studio found out that Disney was also planning to release a new live-action/CGI version that year, so they held back this film's release until 2018. This raises all kinds of questions about espionage and whether the studios spy on each other, like was Disney always planning their update, or did they rush it into production when they found out that Warner Bros. was working on one? Which one was first to start production? I guess it only really matters which one was first to market, so often the studio with the most money to throw at the project, or perhaps the fastest computers, will get theirs released first.
Warner definitely blinked here, even if they felt they had the superior movie. Apparently you don't mess with Disney. I would imagine at some point they must have felt that too much money had been invested to consider scrapping the project, so delaying it for two years was the only option? Perhaps I'll discern more after watching it, but I just can't imagine this film being very necessary if another movie was already planning to tell the same story.
Cate Blanchett carries over from "Hanna", as does the voice of one other actor.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Jungle Book" (Movie #2,680)
THE PLOT: A human child raised by wolves must face off against a menacing tiger named Shere Khan, as well as his own origins.
AFTER: The verdict here, according to me, is that this film is largely unnecessary, it really doesn't bring anything new to the table, except for the fact that in addition to featuring the voices of some very talented actors, motion-capture was used to get some of those actors' facial expressions to come through in the CGI animals. However, this produced mixed results - there was something "off" about some of the animal faces, and I'll wager that some of them looked just a bit too human. Like, do we need to have a tiger with a somewhat-human face? Admittedly, that made Shere Khan look kind of creepy, but a lot less like a tiger. If you want to make a CGI tiger's face that can move based on a human's facial expressions, that's fine, but the resulting creature shouldn't look like some female tiger had a baby with Benedict Cumberbatch, creating a Cumberbatch/tiger hybrid. (a "tigerbatch"?)
The tiger was probably the worst-looking creature, like I don't know why audiences didn't have a very bad reaction to the way it looked, much like they did for the recently-released trailer for the upcoming "Sonic the Hedgehog" movie, and that was just because the video-game character didn't have the right teeth! A lot of Andy Serkis can be seen in the Baloo character, too - the bear has a very half-human sort of face, creating a sort of discomforting hybrid "Bearkis" character. This could be nightmare fuel for at least some people out there.
The basic story of Mowgli being raised by wolves and trained to hunt by Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear is the same - but the King Louis character, the orangutan monkey-king is absent. Now, I'm not sure if this character was always a Disney-fied addition to the original Kipling story - it's possible that NOT having the monkey king represents a return to basics, but in this version all of the monkeys seem to work for the tiger, and that doesn't make sense at all. (Also, when did the name of that animal become "orangutan" instead of "orangu-TANG"? When I was a kid we always said "orangutang", were we wrong or did the nomenclature change in the last few decades?)
There are other story differences between this film and the latest Disney film, like in this film Mowgli speaks to an elephant and makes a deal for help against Shere Khan, and in return he offers to help the elephant get revenge on the hunter that took one of his tusks. In the Disney version, Mowgli helps a baby elephant that is stuck in a ditch, and gains their trust that way. The Disney version also has Kaa the giant python hypnotizing Mowgli and telling him how important the secret of making fire is, and this becomes very important later on in THAT film. But here in "Mowgli", Kaa makes the same point about fire being important, and then it's sort of never followed up on, Mowgli ends up dealing with Shere Khan in a very different way, and not by setting the jungle on fire.
Look, maybe there are a bunch of different stories in that Jungle Book, and maybe they can be strung together in several different ways - and I'm not saying that Disney should have a lock on the kid's film market, or the (not-really) "live-action" animated film market - nor should they be the only company that gets to strip-mine all of Western literature and turn it into box office returns, far from it. But let's face it, they're better at it than anyone else, and if you're a small fish in a big pond, and Disney is the shark, you're probably going to get eaten. And you won't save yourself by putting a semi-human face on an animated tiger.
It was a shrewd move to sell this film to Netflix, saving it from the stench of failure that would have resulted if it had a full theater release. But any success could be short-lived, as soon as Disney Plus hits the market, with all the classic and new Disney films (I presume) PLUS the Marvel films, PLUS the "Star Wars" films and new TV series, so they want to be the big fish in the streaming pond, too. The next couple of years is going to be very interesting on the new frontier.
Also starring Rohan Chand (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Matthew Rhys (last seen in "The Post"), Freida Pinto (last seen in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"), with the voices of Christian Bale (last seen in "Vice"), Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Andy Serkis (last heard in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Tom Hollander (also carrying over from "Hanna"), Peter Mullan (last seen in "Hostiles"), Naomie Harris (last seen in "Moonlight"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Jack Reynor (last seen in "Sing Street"), Louis Ashbourne Serkis.
RATING: 4 out of 10 wolf council meetings
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