"Birds of a feather should flock together"

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2014)

There is an interesting - possibly unintentional - racial subtext with this film, which ends with two of the lead characters returning whey they "belong". Maybe such things weren't intended with a cartoon film about singing bears who give boxing lessons, but it makes it one of the thematically more intriguing Disney offerings.
Technically this doesn't always look like it was made 25 years after Bambi - while the art has a certain elegance in places, it's also scrappy and looks almost pencil drawn at stages. This isn't an express criticism, as it gets by on charm, which it has a considerable supply of.
Centrepiece of the film is the sequence with King Louie, a jazz/scat singing orangutan. Although the idea of having someone possess the mannerisms of black culture while in the form of a monkey is a questionable feat, his signature song - wanting to appropriate the manner of another man in order to share in his freedoms is nicely sardonic for 1967.
However, if there's one criticism of the film that holds up, it's how episodic the whole thing is. Introducing a great villain like Shere Khan three quarters of an hour into the runtime is quite a novel feat, but other characters are picked up and dropped throughout, with very few constants. Louie doesn't appear again, and just as the film begins to wind down, we get some vultures with "what's that supposed to be?" English accents. It's telling how old-hat Disney could be at times in that what were inspired as parodies of the Beatles end up singing a Doo Wop number.
Ultimately while the film has touches of greatness, and is a very pleasing time-filler, the unevenness of the story progression causes it to feel a little flat when viewed as a whole.