(Interestingly, just as in Kipling’s version, there’s no King Louie here to provide comic relief.) Although it’s clear that they all care deeply for Mowgli, they also understand that even with his years of training, he may not be fit to permanently live in the jungle. And the film’s other major characters are more savage than fans of the previous two Jungle Book films might expect, namely Mowgli’s animal mentors: Bagheera (Christian Bale), Baloo (Andy Serkis), and Akela (Peter Mullan), the wolf who served as his surrogate father. As Mowgli’s humanity is buried so deep beneath his animal-like appearance and behaviors, the clash between his savage upbringing and innately human tendencies feels thorny and complex. The Mowgli (Rohan Chand) of this film is a feral boy who’s far removed from the psychology of normal human experience, similar to young Victor in François Truffaut’s The Wild Child. But Andy Serkis’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is no simple re-imagining of the original 1967 animated classic, as it draws inspiration directly from Rudyard Kipling’s collection of Mowgli stories, resulting in a vision of the jungle and its laws of survival that’s far less sanitized than that of the prior Disney films, while also retaining a slightly stronger sense of the source material’s anti-colonialist roots and sense of murky morality. It’s only been two years since the release of Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, so another update to the animated classic, at a glance, seems superfluous.
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