No, Disney Didn't Ruin Kipling's The Jungle Book

    When I told my inner editing circle that I was going to write a defense of Disney’s The Jungle Book, the general reaction was, “Wait, there are actually people who don’t like The Jungle Book?”

    Kind of.

    The Jungle Book doesn’t typically inspire the same ire as other installments within the Disney gallery. People outside the Disney umbrella don’t hate it the way they hate Frozen for making all the money or the way they hate The Little Mermaid for, I don’t know, letting its heroine be a fully formed character. Even the film's awkward racial coding is typically discussed in package with similar transgressions from films like Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp. The common viewer doesn't "hate" The Jungle Book so much as underestimate it.

    But the common viewer may also just not be as triggered as I am when they're reading the Washington Post and come across writers like Michael Dirda shading the “jejune film representations” that the population knows Kipling’s writing from. My undergrad years were full of this as well. Demonstrating that one saw through the commercial machinations of Walt Disney Animation was basically an entry level assignment for new majors wanting to prove to the professors that they were serious film students, and dismissing The Jungle Book somehow carried even more weight than any of the Princess movies.

    When you've been a self-professed Disney fan on the internet for as long as I have, you're used to this narrative. Another day, another highbrow shaming adults for watching Disney movies. Really, you're almost numb to it, so much so that you might even forget to stop and ask yourself when the last time was that you read the Kipling books versus the last time you saw Disney's adaptation of those books.

That said, I have often encountered a certain attitude in academic conversation when it comes to adaptation and Disney, one that takes as a given that the divergences within Disney adaptations are somehow evidence of an intellectual failing, which has me believing that there's more going on here that isn't being said.

The Shining (1980)

    This argument is also interesting to me here because while things like "faithful adaptations" tend to be major sticking points for fans of the "Percy Jackson" books, academics don't typically have a lot to say about how "faithful" an adaptation should be. Films ultimately speak a different language than novels or plays, and so it's non-sequitur to expect a story to retain every last detail as it jumps mediums.

    Moreover, one also has to be open to how different authors and societies will respond to a story across time and culture. Divergences and extrapolations in adaptation can reveal things about nature of the society that both produces and receives any given piece of media. This is normally a conversation that excites film scholars ... except when that conversation drifts to Mickey Mouse.

    But at the same time, making the case for Disney's The Jungle Book by arguing that fidelity in adaptation shouldn't matter anyways, that's also missing the forest for the trees. Whatever you want to argue was "the point" of Kipling's work, it was a lot more complex than how dark or austere the tone was. Disney's adaptation certainly transforms a lot in adaptation, but when you reduce either version down to what story they were telling, you see that both the books by Rudyard Kipling and the film directed by Bruce Reitherman have a lot of overlap, such that I think Walt Disney knew exactly what he was doing when he gave his animators the go-ahead to bring Mowgli and Baloo into the Disney archive.

The Jungle Book actually holds an unusual place in the pantheon for me in that I didn’t really even come to appreciate the film until late adolescence/early adulthood. I watched it as a kid, yeah, but it wasn’t necessarily a childhood favorite for me like The Little Mermaid or even Brother Bear. I guess it’s nostalgic by virtue of belonging to the larger Disney family, but it was only from this side of adulthood that I truly appreciated it. Moving into the man village has only enriched my ability to appreciate honest representations of the jungle.

    And from the other end of that all, I'm here today to say that championing the Rudyard Kipling text isn't fair ground to disparage Disney's spectacular adaptation of The Jungle Book. And it is spectacular. Not just because "Ah, my childhood," and not even just because "it was Walt's last film, show some respect!" Disney's The Jungle Book is absolutely deserving of all its accolades, and we're here today to discuss why.

If we’re going to talk about how the Disney film did or didn’t ruin the Kipling text, it helps to know what exactly it did or didn’t ruin. So, after looking at the origins of Kipling’s writings, we’ll look at various film interpretations throughout the decades and how they approached the process of adapting the books. Then we’ll talk about the aesthetics and context the public has for Disney’s process of adapting. With that all under our belt, we'll put a magnifying glass to the thematic conversations at work within Disney's film and figure out what exactly it was Walt wanted with Kipling's work anyways.

 

         Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book

         Rudyard Kipling was born in December of 1865 to John and Alice Kipling in the Bombay Presidency of British India. He spent the earliest part of his childhood doing what most of us wish we could have done as kids, playing in the jungles of India. This little paradise came to an end when his parents sent him and his sister off to boarding school back in Britain. It was goodbye jungle romps and hello dunce caps. Little Rudyard reportedly hated this period of his life and just gritted his teeth until he grew up to become a writer, and you see this echoed in the story of Mowgli.

    After Mowgli is banished from the wolf pack, Mowgli finds himself crying for the first time and not understanding what's happening to him. Bagheera has to explain, "No, little brother. That is only tears, such as men use ... Now I know that thou art a man, and a man's cub no longer. The jungle is indeed shut to thee henceforward. Let them fall, Mowgli, they are only tears."

       A couple of things to note: what we think of as Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” actually comes from a series of short stories originally published in a magazine and later organized into two different books, “The Jungle Book” published in 1894 and “The Second Jungle Book” published in 1895. Also, not all of the stories within The Jungle Book are actually about Mowgli. The Jungle Book also includes stories like “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and “The White Seal.”

    Moreover, the stories about Mowgli are not told in sequence. From the initial “Jungle book” for example, the first story follows Mowgli’s adoption by the wolf pack and jumps to his expulsion from the jungle, the second takes place while he’s being raised by the pack, and the third story is set after his banishment. And the Mowgli stories from “The Second Jungle Book” are all peppered in between. 

The stories of Mowgli don't really build to one progressive saga in the vein of something like Harry Potter. It’s more like a sprawling mythology that Kipling fleshed out across the span of a few years. This is one reason why the text itself lends itself so well to adaptation to begin with. In between all the iconic characters and settings, there’s a lot of fluidity between adventures themselves, a lot of wiggle room for prospecting storytellers. The classic scenario of "boy raised in the jungle with his animal friends" carries more authority than the specific narrative events.

         Viewing the narrative chronologically, the story follows Mowgli after he is orphaned and adopted into the wolf pack. Mowgli grows up in the jungle and has many adventures as he’s guided by his animal friends like Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, who teach him the law of the jungle and what it means to be a part of the pack.

    There'll be episodes where Baloo and Bagheera tell Mowgli "don't hang around with those monkeys, they're nothing but trouble," and then Mowgli goes ahead and plays with them anyways. And when Mowgli is kidnapped by the monkeys, Baloo and Bagheera run to bail him out of trouble (in the book, they actually enlist the help of Kaa), and at the end of the day Mowgli's has a character development.

         Years later, Shere Khan challenges daddy wolf Akela for charge of the pack, and Mowgli, being the loyal cub he is, stands up against the tiger. Mowgli’s fatal mistake is stealing fire from the man-village and using it to force Shere Khan into submission. Shere Khan backs down, but the other animals are triggered by seeing Mowgli using man’s most dangerous weapon, so they vote Mowgli off the island. Dismayed, Mowgli returns back to the man village and tries to assimilate into their culture.

         The man village has mixed feelings about adopting this jungle kid. In particular, Buldeo, the village hunter, sees Mowgli as unnatural and tries to turn the village against him. To regain favor with the village, Mowgli offers to slay Shere Khan who has been preying on the village cattle. He does this by setting a stampede of water buffalo on Shere Khan while he sleeps. But when Buldeo sees Mowgli talking with the animals, he tells the villagers that Mowgli is a sorcerer, and the villagers vote him off their island too. The story ends with Mowgli resolving to find his own people in the jungle, with the footnote that he may return to the man-village to marry once he’s grown up.

    At a glance, there are a couple of differences that separate the Disney work from Kipling's original text, not just in tone or style, but in the plot itself. Mowgli spends more time weaving in and out of the man village in the Kipling story, for example. Many of the characters are also very different. Baloo and Bagheera basically switch personalities in the Disney film: Bagheera is Mowgli's buddy who always dotes on him, and Baloo is the strict teacher who doesn't have time for Mowgli's nonsense--the whole monkey episode in the book begins after Baloo smacks him too hard reprimanding him for not paying attention in class and he runs off crying.

    Disney transformed a lot in adaptation, and critics have used this point as a basis for devaluing the film. Again, this is interesting because film scholars never take issue with this outside this very specific realm of criticism.

         But again, arguing that the story and character changes do/don't ruin the film is kind of the wrong conversation. If we’re going to talk about how Disney’s movie relates to the Kipling text, it helps to know how others have approached the process of adaptation. What does “The Jungle Book” mean in the pop culture conversation?

The Jungle Book in Adaptation Part 1: Themes of The Jungle Book

         Amongst the various reinterpretations of Kipling’s work, two primary themes show up more often than the rest.

    The first is a Dances with Wolves brand diatribe on mankind encroaching on nature. In these versions, the jungle is a treasure trove of wild beauty that the world of men will inevitably corrupt with Mowgli acting as a sort of bridge between both worlds. And adaptations that favor this reading may have Mowgli spend time stuck between which world he belongs to, but as the human world proves itself too incorrigible, Mowgli ends up returning to the jungle.

        We see this in the first feature adaptation of Kipling’s stories in 1942 with “The Jungle Book.” This one has a largely human cast and mostly focuses on Mowgli’s adjustment to village life. This makes sense given that special effects were what they were in 1942. When animals need to be in the action, the film makes heavy use of frame juxtaposition to suggest that Mowgli and these animals are sharing the same space, or else they employ like a puppet cobra for Mowgli to interact with.

         This adaptation positions Mowgli as a sort of defender against the greedy men of the man village and the threats they pose to the jungle. This version has Buldeo as a penitent antagonist who initially tries to use Mowgli to acquire an ancient treasure in the monkey temple. Buldeo eventually learns the error of his ways after Mowgli saves the jungle and the village from a fire. The film ends when Mowgli decides city life isn’t for him and returns to the jungle while the man village citizens ponder what they’ve learned from him.

    Recent adaptations especially often color this “man vs nature” reading with critique Britain’s occupation of India. Serkis’ version for example employs “Lockwood,” a sort of British remix of the “Buldeo” character whose appetite for poaching echoes the white man’s conquest of the Indian jungles. (Heck, maybe this is also why Shere Khan always has a British accent.)

         This reading is partly a response to the worldviews Kipling absorbed and regurgitated being part of the British occupation of India. After “The Jungle Book” stories, Kipling's most famous contribution to literature is arguably his poem “The White Man’s Burden,” a sort of hymn to British imperialism and the responsibility all white men had to educate and civilize the savages of Africa and India ... I bring this up in part because it highlights the limitations of authorial intent. Anyways …

         The other popular theme follows a more Stand by Me track, that of maturation and leaving behind childhood. Most of Mowgli’s stories have him learning life lessons from Baloo, Bagheera, or the wolf pack that will help him grow up. While there aren’t exactly old Stephen Colbert interviews with Kipling explaining his inspiration, it's not considered controversial to propose that Kipling viewed his home in the Indian jungles as a sort of cradle and Mowgli’s expulsion from the jungle as a metaphor for his own childhood being ripped from him.

    Adaptations that favor this reading often end with Mowgli leaving the jungle for good to go live as a man. In these versions, the jungle behaves like a metaphor for childhood, a carefree playground in which the man-cub develops a sense of self and personality while acquiring life lessons necessary for adulthood. Once Mowgli has grown up he moves on to greater things.

       In 1973, we saw another animated adaptation of the stories surface in Russia, “The Adventures of Mowgli” favoring this reading. (This is handily my favorite adaptation after the Disney version.) This adaptation strings together many of the familiar Kipling stories into a semi-unified narrative that tracks Mowgli’s life from infancy to adulthood. The animation style is very fluid and abstract, which lends itself to the child’s fable atmosphere they are going for. Though its narrative draws more overtly from the Kipling text, its tone is more or less on level with the 1967 film and even has a few musical numbers.

    Like the Disney version, this one culminates in Mowgli realizing his time in the jungle has ended when he encounters the beautiful village girl and realizes his future is with her. This adaptation even does something I wish the Disney film did by letting Mowgli actually express some grief when he realizes that following this girl will mean losing his home in the jungle. There’s something really touching about Baloo, Bagheera, and the rest of his animal friends banding together to tell Mowgli that it’s okay for him to move on to this next phase of life. (Meanwhile Disney’s Mowgli just dips on Baloo the moment he hits puberty.)

    Between these two major readings, you’ll notice that the Disney film takes after the second category. The 1967 film is at its core the story of Mowgli graduating from childhood and into adulthood. For a story about the finite space of youth, it makes sense for any given adaptation to land on a more playful and inviting vibe, especially since retellings of the "Jungle Book" have never bound themselves to a single tone.

 

The Jungle Book in Adaptation Pt. 2: The Tone of the Jungle

An anime tv series adaptation that I didn't get to talk about

    What the Disney film did for “The Jungle Book” as a franchise is link it more explicitly with a childlike "fun" aesthetic. This is viable material if you're wanting to go the "childhood" route, but that's not what The Jungle Book means to everyone. Recent adaptations seem to feel a need to compensate for years of Jungle Book cartoons, especially the two we're going to look at in some detail.

I'd argue that these versions go a little overboard with the tone shift. Yes, the Kipling stories didn't have Mowgli swing-dancing with the monkeys, but neither did they feature Mowgli stumbling on the stuffed head of his childhood best friend mounted on the wall. (And yes, that really happens in the Serkis film.) Again, we're talking about adaptation, and this isn't necessarily a bad direction to take the material, but I do maintain that this isn't necessarily the truer way to play Kipling. It's just another way.

Even with the Disney film decidedly centering on a tone different from its source material, you still see the throughline between the two stories. Here's a tale about a kid on the verge of growing up acting out all these rituals of maturation within a cast of exotic animals that are probably really exciting for children to imagine. Harry Rickets observed in The Unforgiving Minute - A Life of Rudyard Kipling, "Not only were all these wild animals eager to care for Mowgli, but they competed with each other for his affection and acknowledged his power over them, a situation that has appealed to generations of child readers."

The Mowgli we see in Disney's film is probably the closest we get in adaptation to the Mowgli that Kipling envisioned. The stories type him as being curious, brash, and also kind of a pest, getting into staring contests with the wolves just to make them mad, and he has a ten-year-old's sense of invincibility. But that stubbornness belays real tenacity, and at the end of the day, this kid just wants someone to look out for him.

Disney takes that basic starting point and turns it into something analogous to "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer." In the context of adaptation, this isn't really any more heretical than taking Gaston Leroux's novel about the mutated creature living under the catacombs of the Paris Opera House and turning it into a bombastic stage show about a musical sex god. Still, the criticisms toward the animated film appear to have really influenced Disney's 2016 remake, whose dark and grounded tone is made only more glaring against the backdrop of the animated film it is remaking.

To be clear, King Kong Louie was NOT in the Kipling stories

    Many of my associates from my film program, especially those who broadcasted their disenchantment with the 1967 film, actually appeared to really like this movie, citing how the film "actually understood what Kipling was going for" and this line has never made sense to me. The remake lands in a tone that is decidedly heavier, which perhaps makes it more palatable for an audience that might feel insecure about partaking in children's media, but the remake's attempts to realign with the Kipling text have never felt more than surface level.

    To be fair, the remake does draw specific pieces from the Kipling writing. The law of the pack that the wolves recite comes directly from the stories, as does the bit about the water truce when a certain rock emerges. Mother Wolf's insistence that Mowgli is "Mine, mine to me," also comes right out of Kipling. On the whole, though, the remake's interpretation of Mowgli's situation is very generous. It takes more or less a buffet approach to Kipling's writing--much in the same way that Walt did. Only the gaps somehow feel much wider in this adaptation.

    The remake ditches the ending with Mowgli choosing to leave his childhood behind and live as a man in the jungle, instead leaving him to chill in the treetops with his animal buddies. This isn’t really in the tradition of the “leaving childhood behind” theme, nor does it fall in line with the “man vs nature” theme since Mowgli never interacts with any humans.

    Little about this remake actually brings to mind the Kipling stories. Shere Khan casting Akela’s lifeless body off a cliff feels less like something out of Kipling and more out of George RR Martin. This remake chases the feel of Kipling’s books, but it doesn't really achieve that beyond making the story “darker.” (At least it tries. The remake for some reason thinks that lines like “You have never been a more endangered species” make sense in such a gritty film.)

Moreover, in chasing this heavier tone and embracing this dustbin aesthetic, you wind up losing the most essential part of "The Jungle Book" story: we don't feel the same urgency to keep Mowgli here because the jungle itself has lost all charm. Kipling gave it that with flowery language. Disney Animation, with drawing and music. Disney live-action? They gave us Bill Murray and Christopher Walken ...

    Upon revisiting the Kipling stories, one thing that stands out to me that I didn't necessarily get the first time is that for how brooding and mysterious the language is, Kipling absolutely wove a great deal of sentimentality into his text. When Baloo and Bagheera go to Kaa to beg for his help to rescue Mowgli from the monkeys, they impart just how much they love this kid. Mowgli falls asleep cuddled on Bagheera's back as he carries him through the jungle. As Rickets observed, this whole story floats on the throughline of this one kid looking for a family to adopt him. That sentimentality which critics so feverishly detest in the Disney cartoon is absolutely a part of the source material--and it is something that the remake is desperately lacking. 

    To be fair, the remake isn't entirely bereft of emotion. Like, we're supposed to be sad when Mowgli says goodbye to his wolf family, but when Bill Murray's Baloo is digging through the temple ruins saying "If anything happened to that kid, I'll never forgive myself," it just doesn't mean nearly as much as it did when Phil Harris said it in the animated film. That film did a really great job at endearing us to Mowgli and Baloo's friendship in just a few short scenes, such that we buy into that relationship. The remake? Not so much. 

    We never see Mowgli and Baloo playing together. We never see them being truly comfortable with one another. Their whole arrangement in the remake has Baloo flat-out exploiting the kid for child labor. And so this remake thinking it can just plug in the same values from the animated film without laying any of the groundwork--and claiming that it somehow understands the Kipling stories better? I'm not here for it ...

         Developed alongside and independent of the Disney remake was Andy Serkis’ reinterpretation of the Kipling stories. Originally titled “Jungle Book: Origins” and set up at Warner Bros, this movie faced an uphill climb from the word go. Basically all of the movie’s biggest selling points—the darker tone, the all-star cast, the cutting-edge visual effects—were also the selling points of Disney’s own remake. Even Cate Blanchett’s genderbent Kaa felt like old news after the remake pulled that exact stunt with Scarlet Johannsen. The 2016 movie basically made Serkis’ film redundant, and so the movie was relegated to a Netflix release in 2018, titled Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, where the film died quietly.

         This interpretation has some pacing issues, but it also has a lot to love. I actually prefer the more lively motion-capture approach to the straight photorealism in the 2016 film, and the film pounds its emotional beats a lot harder than the 2016 film. Serkis’ version also ends with Mowgli staying in the jungle, but he at least has Mowgli spend some time in the village first so the man-cub can make an educated decision. (I think it's also worth remarking upon that the two adaptations that most closely follow the Kipling text--the Serkis film and the Soviet film--have very different vibes.)

         Two different teams set out to adapt The Jungle Book, both with very similar ambitions, both were similar in quality, yet one was received significantly better than the other. This might not have been the case had Disney let Serkis do Serkis and just made a straight adaptation of their own movie instead of this dehydrated copy. But Disney wants the whole table to itself. Disney wants a “kid” version and an “adult” version. Rather than embracing what makes their own adaptation so unique, and rather than making the playing field easier for other adaptations of the material, modern Disney wants to have it all ways.  

  In the context of adaptation, turning Mowgli's story into this grim and dark outsider's journey about reclaiming one's home is a perfectly valid choice, but claiming that it is somehow a return to Kipling's intentions makes for a cursory reading of his original work.

    It does, however, reveal a lot about how both Disney and the public engage with the 1967 animated film. Or rather, it reveals how they don't engage with it, and the academic landscape being what it is, I think we can start to guess why.

         "Disneyfied"

    The phrase "Disneyfied" likes to rear its head in semi-academic discourse as a pejorative. The term connotes a text or subject material being stripped of its intellectual and philosophical complexities into something unsophisticated, cloying, and easily consumed. "Jejune," as it were. It's a phrase you often hear in the context of Disney films adapted from pre-existing sources famous for their heavy themes and tones, films like The Jungle Book.

It bears repeating that the canon of Disney’s animated films has a specific style and sensibility. It also pans out that not everyone would have the palette for that specific style and sensibility, and you know what, that’s just fine. I for one have never been crazy about the Coen brothers’ films, and I’ve never even really understood why, but I'm able to acknowledge that their films maybe aren't for me while still being glad that they are celebrated for doing what they love. Maybe a person just isn't feeling what Disney did with Kipling’s book, and that’s no sin. I include this caveat because I don’t think it’s helpful to cast people who don’t like Disney as these grouchy old misers with hearts two sizes too small.

         Just so, there’s an elitist attitude that sometimes accompanies this thought--the assumption that the Disney style is itself lesser. After all, Disney is just for kids, isn’t it? If you haven’t figured that out by the time you’re an adult then you must be in some state of arrested development. I come across this attitude a lot, both in pop culture interaction and professional film discourse--and that's what I want to push back against.

    I can think of a lot of reasons why critics have this distrust of both The Walt Disney Company and its fans. Part of this attitude stems from the innately capitalistic game of pop culture, a game which Disney has historically played very well. People see Disney hitting a billion at the box office with multiple films in a given year, and they feel a little uncomfortable with just how much power the Walt Disney Company has in entertainment. They want to keep the powers that be in check, but because they don’t trust the fanboys to govern themselves, they take matters into their own hands.

    Adding to this, many of Disney’s most prized cash cows were themselves adapted from pre-existing stories: Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, basically every fairy-tale, the list goes on. Disney acquires these stories that someone else authored and then uses them as launching pads for their own merchandising outlets. Once Disney has absorbed a property onto its infinity gauntlet, the Disney take on the story becomes the defining version of said story.

Ask any given crowd how many of them have met Mary Poppins at Disneyland versus how many have read any of the books by PL Travers. This distrust of Disney’s marketing prowess leaves a lot of critics reciting the over-the-counter narrative that Disney is not just childlike, but juvenile. I'll admit I don’t know what percentage of people have been kept from reading Kipling’s books because they have the Disney movie. (I’d guess it’s comparable to the ratio of people who watch the MGM "Wizard of Oz" over reading the book by L. Frank Baum.)

         But this untextured mindset about Disney movies all lacking in nuance or artistry, it leads to a lot of really shallow criticism of the Disney oeuvre. It shows a supreme lack of confidence in both the artistic aspirations of the Disney story team and the mental faculties of its fanbase. In The Jungle Book conversation especially, it overlooks the dynamic animation, lively voicework, and fatally infectious music. There's a lot more to this equation than just our nostalgia-programmed brain responding to conditioning.

         Disney was kind of the central entry point into my larger film study, and I always lament how so many academics thoughtlessly deter other potential film scholars from joining the party simply because they haven't renounced the Disneyland fireworks show. As someone who watches a whole range of movies, someone who reads books by respected film scholars, someone who has presented at academic film conferences, let me set this record straight once and for all: you can like Disney—goodness you can love Disney—and still be an intellectual. Believe me when I say there is plenty to discuss with a film like The Jungle Book outside of its plushie market. 

          I'm not here to say that we shouldn't ponder the effect Disney branding has on pre-existing texts--I dedicate my Beauty and the Beast essay to this very phenomenon, and I refer to other adaptations of The Jungle Book in this essay for a reason--but it’s also not an either/or situation. You can adore both the Disney adaptation of The Little Mermaid and the 1837 story by Hans Christian Andersen.

           Critics have wondered why Mr. Disney would even want to graft Kipling's book into his army of Meet and Greet characters if he was going to so fundamentally change the nature of the book. We can only speculate, but knowing what we do about Kipling's own reasons for writing the book in the first place, we notice a throughline between the book and the movie.

         What did Walt want with The Jungle Book?

      Mr. Walter Elias Disney in the 1950s was becoming increasingly less involved in the production of the animated studio he built from the ground up. His team of storytellers was becoming more adept, and Walt himself was becoming more concerned with other branches of his company including his emerging live-action film division and the Disneyland project.

    By the 1960s, his divided attention was starting to reflect on his animated films. It was the ice-bucket reception of The Sword in the Stone in 1963 that spurred Walt to step away from the parks for a second and help get the animation department back on track. This sent up a red flare to Walt, and in response he decided to spread his attention a little more evenly between "Pirates of the Caribbean" and his home studio’s next project. This ended up being something of a tender mercy as Walt would pass away during the production of this film, and The Jungle Book is acknowledged as the last film to have Disney's personal touch.

    Kipling’s stories caught the eye of Disney’s animators, who were raring for a chance to play more with animating animal characters. Walt first gave the creative reins to story writer, Bill Peet, who had a strong history with the company, having storyboarded all of 101 Dalmatians by himself. Peet’s draft was inspired by the 1942 film as much as the Kipling stories. The climax, for example, had Buldeo the village hunter force Mowgli to show him the treasure in the ancient temple.

     Peet was the one who figured out that the running line throughout the film would be getting Mowgli back to the man village one way or another. A lot of the character types and personalities were also settled on around here. This is where Baloo went from Mowgli's algebra teacher to his chill uncle. (Incidentally, the one song to be carried over from Peet's version would be "The Bare Necessities.") Peet also had the idea that the monkeys should have a central spokesman character, which is where we got King Louie.

    Walt was interested in the players, it was the tone that he took issue with. After leaving Peet to his own devices for a few months, Walt decided he wasn’t a fan of this darker vision. (This version actually had Mowgli shoot Shere Khan.) So Peet left the studio, and the project was rebooted.

    All sorts of crew members give slight variations of the story, but everyone agrees that at some point after Peet left, Walt gathered the team together and asked them all how many of them had read Kipling's book. When none of them rose their hands, he gave them the direction that their homework assignment was not to read the book, and his critics have never forgiven him for it.

    A few things though ...

       It's not like there's nothing mysterious about the finished film. The film’s opening credits track through picturesque vistas of the lush jungle as a haunting overture hints at the exotic adventures contained within. We’ll see many of these backdrops throughout the remainder of the film. Yes, the film is more light-hearted than many other adaptations of the material, but the film also has some emotional dialogue that is often unacknowledged, and it starts off with that same reverence for the mystical quality of the jungle that made Kipling's writing so enrapturing.

I’m also reminded of a lost plot piece from Walt’s draft, a deleted character named “Rocky the Rhino.” This fellow was described as a dim-witted rhinoceros whose function was pure comedic relief. He would have appeared alongside the vultures in the last fifteen minutes of the movie, even participating in their song “What Friends are For.”

    But Rocky never made it past storyboards. This is in part because this chapter of the film was becoming somewhat crowded, and also because Walt seemed to figure out that this giant buffoon of a character maybe wasn’t as funny as he initially thought. If Walt’s goal really was to make the book more palatable by appealing to the lowest denominator of childish storytelling, then why get rid of this character?

        Peet's version of this film also featured a song called “I Knew I Belonged to Her,” where Mowgli describes a dream he had to Baloo and Bagheera. This dream has him travel to the man-village and see his human mother waiting for him, and this vision is ultimately the thing that persuaded Mowgli to return to the man-village. It’s a lovely song with a real haunting quality, but I don’t lament that it was cut. Something I want to point out, though, is that in Peet’s original vision, it’s Mowgli’s mother that beckons him to return home. In the finished film, it’s the village girl. This is a slight but significant distinction that I think reveals a lot about Disney's motivation in adapting this book. We'll circle back to this here in a bit ...

But in juxtaposing the complaints thrown against The Jungle Book and the system errors of The Sword in the Stone, you can see what exactly it is that Walt wanted to inject into what would be his final film--which further reveals just how flimsy the case against The Jungle Book is.

Both movies are episodic, yes, as was the norm for animation back then, but with "Jungle Book" there is also a clear end goal we are chasing--let's get this kid to his safe base before the tiger gets him. This gives all the mini-adventures both thematic and narrative utility. With The Sword in the Stone, the ending genuinely feels like the animators just ran out of ink and had to figure out how to wrap up the movie in six minutes or less. Wart claiming Excalibur at the end does not coincide with any personal victory or the closure of any arc we have been following. And when you look back on everything leading up to him getting planted on the throne, you're not really sure how exactly this kid has grown to measure up to this new responsibility.

Mind you, the animators for The Jungle Book also faced some trouble figuring out how to get Mowgli to the Man Village in the end, but I maintain that the conclusion they came to works really well within the narrative framework they were building. I'll get more into why here in a bit. But to the larger question of why Disney ever wanted to touch Kipling's stories in the first place ...

     It's commonly accepted that Kipling wrote his "Jungle Book" stories to process his own experience with the abrupt ending of childhood, when--like Mowgli himself--Kipling was kicked out of the jungles of India and taken to the man village of British boarding school. At its core, Kipling's "Jungle Book" stories are about a young boy realizing and accepting his childhood is over. And at its core, Disney's adaptation of the book is about the exact same thing.

        

         What is the Disney movie about anyways?

         Much like the jungle was a sort of cradle for Kipling, the jungle is Mowgli’s playground. Mowgli’s ultimate fantasy is getting to play in the jungle with all his cool animal friends. The conflict in this film is getting Mowgli to leave this playground behind so he can cross into this world of adulthood. The whole movie is essentially Mowgli hopping from animal group to animal group hoping that one of them will adopt him and keep him tethered to the jungle.

         Each party represents a potential future for Mowgli if he remains in his jungle playground. The elephants are too big to be bossed around, but how's a ten-year-old kid going to keep up with them? King Louie and the monkeys present a sort of unsupervised partying, which sounds like fun but ends with the ancient ruins literally crumbling all around him. Even Kaa is able to briefly tempt Mowgli by promising a future without grievance or demands if he'll just slide into his stomach. Mowgli doesn't belong to this world anymore, no matter how much he wants to.

         The biggest agent in Mowgli's progression is Baloo. At first, Mowgli likes Baloo because he’s the one guy who doesn’t want to kick him out of the jungle. Bagheera's concern for Mowgli's wellbeing is his creed, but he lacks the nurturing touch needed to access Mowgli here at this crucial juncture. The whole conceit of Baloo is that he is perfectly equipped to supply Mowgli with the attention that a kid needs.

        This is also why Baloo is such an effective character. His care for Mowgli puts him entirely at odds with his own nature. Baloo’s very much a creature of pleasure and would love nothing more than to play with Mowgli all day long. Baloo could easily be just another cul-de-sac obstructing Mowgli's progression. We see during the chapter with the monkeys when he loses track of Mowgli almost immediately, and again at the ruins when even the suggestion of a party renders him useless. But Baloo puts Mowgli's safety ahead of his own interest when he realizes the kid is in danger here in the jungle. Yet because Mowgli defines friendship exclusively on the terms of whoever will let him have the most fun, Mowgli takes Baloo’s reversal as the ultimate betrayal. Once Baloo stops providing that endless fun, he runs away.

    This comes to a head in the climax when Baloo throws himself in front of Mowgli to protect him from Shere Khan. Seeing Baloo lay his life down for him shifts Mowgli's whole context for what it means to be a "friend." It’s here that he realizes that friendship isn’t just splashing around in the river together, it’s caring about someone else so much that you would lay down your life for them.

    And once Mowgli learns to see others as more than simply toys, he's evolved past that childish mindset that kept him rooted in the jungle. Baloo could never "take care" of the kid, and neither could he help him become the fully-formed adult he needs to become. But he does give Mowgli some concept of what it means to be truly invested in someone else. He gives Mowgli a sneak peek at what awaits him in the man village within the network of the community, of the family, and this is what really initiates Mowgli into the world of The Man Village. 

    Again, it’s a romantic figure, not a mothering figure as it was in Peet's draft, who draws Mowgli into the world of adulthood. By choosing to go to the Man Village, he's not just running back to his cradle, he's choosing to grow up. And maturation isn't just an inevitability he acquiesces to like in the Kipling texts. Nor is it something he does just so he won't get eaten by a tiger. Mowgli sees a future for himself and decides that is what he wants.

         Some have griped about the only significant female character in the film having no purpose beyond ferrying the male protagonist into the world of puberty, and I don’t think there’s nothing to that (don’t worry, she’s actually one of the highlights of the film’s DTV sequel), but I also think that the metaphor works. Mowgli graduating from the jungle was always about leaving the playground and realizing that there is a future for him within the man village that he can never have out here.

         And there’s a reason we don’t see Mowgli in the village itself. We don't need to. Once he’s graduated from the jungle he’s ceased to exist within the realm of this film; when we exit the theater, Mowgli walks out with us into the world of car payments and serious adult relationships. Hopefully, his time spent in the jungle has made him a more wholesome individual, but it’s this world that he belongs to now. The movie is to us what the jungle was to Mowgli, and we’re all in the man village now.

The Man Village

Any adaptation where Mowgli assimilates back into either of the worlds he's connected to kind of goes off-course from Kipling's original intention, even though most adaptations do just that, including those we might call "faithful adaptations." But the Disney version, which has him choose to graduate into manhood, also runs counter to what popular discourse sees with the Disney ethos.

Critics shade Walt for selling a childish worldview, but they overlook how his films, especially the films made during his lifetime, actually encourage kids to say goodbye to Neverland and step into adulthood. (This is actually a reverse of what we see in modern Disney films, as I discuss in my Tangled essay, which tend to target adults hardened by reality who just need a little more childhood faith in their lives.)

  "Snow White" exalts the virtue of being kind to others even when the world is unkind to you. "Bambi" traces out phases of love, loss, and tribulation as natural cycles of life. "Jungle Book" highlights the evolution from living in a child's playground to an adult community. Popular discourse likes to cast Disney as the merry-go-round that never lets you leave, but when you look at the text of any one of the films, what you see are promises that while adulthood may be full of pirates and witches and tigers, growing up itself is nothing to be scared of. Those things we practice in childhood--love, friendship, kindness--help bind good people together, and those remain available to us in "the man village" so long as we afford room for them.

    When people put forth a narrative that the Disney film is stripping the Kipling text of its intellectual or moral value, they are implicitly stating the Disney film offers no intellectual or moral value of its own. They assume that kids can’t learn from Mowgli’s metamorphosis from a self-centered kid obsessed with his own entertainment to an individual within a community, and that just doesn't stand up to honest analysis of the film, nor to the nature of honest analysis itself.

    That said, it is an attitude stemming from real issues, like the way modern audiences continue to opt out of engaging with older texts when there's a more current model on hand. So if you haven't read Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, give it a glance one of these days. It might not only enrich your understanding of the Disney film, but it might also just be an interesting read on its own.

From The Professor's own collection

    When the lay-viewer tears down some artifact of child's media, especially when that artifact bears the Disney seal, there's the tendency to reduce its most interesting points to nothing more than a haphazard bundle of jingles and silly cartoon drawings. Something that might have been interesting to the undeveloped mind, but not something we need to trifle with once we've entered the man village, as it were. But though we must all leave the jungle, we must not forget it, nor be ungrateful for the time spent there. That's something that Disney films really understand. 

    For that matter, that's something Kipling understood too.

     

                   --The Professor