The King of the Jungle

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2000)

Criticising The Jungle Book - or Disney's most popular film titles generally - is probably seen as close to heresy in some quarters. After all, it's just for kids, right? Wrong - it's the things that are 'just for kids' which are often the most insidious. It's where layers of misty-eyed memories and nostalgia prevent a clear assessment of what's on offer, or how dated or questionable a favourite story can be. Fear of 'reading too much into it' often precludes critical engagement.
The Jungle Book has many strengths (and the rating I have given it echoes that feeling). Its characterisation is bold and colourful. Sherman and Gilkyson's songs are justifiably classics. Bruns' music is evocative and apt. The plot is well paced and structured. If the animation is not outstanding (particularly when compared to the triumphs of Fantasia and Snow White) it remains perfectly adequate. And yet, and yet...
Why the hesitation? Elements of racism in the movie are certainly stumbling blocks. Louis Prima, although Italian, sings like a black and to modern eyes at least his monkey-man routine should be taken less lightly than it usually is. Baloo speaks for himself, jive daddy talk and all in comfortably stereotypical fashion. Creatures with dignity and power, in contrast, like Shere Khan or Bagheera, tend to have upper class 'English' accents implying disapproving class and authority.
Then there is the question of women - or rather the absence or them. Mowgli one of the long line of orphans in Disney animations (an honourable exception being 101 Dalmations which, constrained by an original, actually has both surviving mother and father figures for the main characters). Sadly Mowgli is one who merely encounters one potential father figure after another. When a female of his own species finally appears, at the end of the film, she is diminutive, housework orientated and apart from singing, singularly bereft of conversation. For the Disney animators, the whole forest is a male playground, one created for jokey bonding and Mowgli's rite of passage, in a scheme that is especially peculiar to the studio. The only exception to this rule of thumb is Colonel Hathi's wife, and remains in vaguely mutinous isolation, happy to support Mowgli in his quest.
Disney's cutsie anthropomorphism is such a common occurrence in his output that it seems natural and all of a piece here. Indeed so used are we to this way of showing nature, that sometimes we forget what we know must be the truth. This is a world, like all of the studio's others, where animals are treated either as objects or, more reassuringly as 'people' with no species life of their own. Its the ideal jungle for Uncle Walt: no creature need be considered at all except in human terms, and everything knows its place. Nature, normally 'red in tooth and claw', sings a comic song for its living, and then is divided into a facetious social system of character actors, ugly and sweet, cunning and charmingly dozy.
And what of Mowgli's journey, his travelling from place to place, from animal kingdom to man-village and from childhood to the brink of manhood? At first sight it seems to be a rite of passage, a period of trial bringing him to maturity. But Mowgli actually learns very little. All Baloo teaches him is how to eat fruit without worrying about the little unnecessary issues in life. His fight with Shere Khan springs more from ignorance and stubbornness than any acquired sense of self preservation or knowledge. Mowgli make some temporary friendships, grows dewy eyed at his first sight of a female.. and that's about it. As a moral journey, it is a failure. (A similar vagueness attends Pinnochio's 'education' where any benefits of experience are overruled by the Good Fairy's largesse) If The Jungle Book intends to provide a lesson of some sort during Mowgli's procession through the undergrowth, then it fails.
Millions have enjoyed Disney's classic before and will do so in future. But at least if we face some of the issues raised, and take a critical look at a characteristic reworking of the source material, it will make the walk through the jungle more interesting.