FILM 1655: THE JUNGLE BOOK
TRIVIA: Amid the treasures in King
Louie's temple, one of them happens to be Genie's lamp from Aladdin (1992).
In The Jungle Book (1967),
King Louie was an orangutan. In this film, he's a gigantopithecus, an ancestor
of the orangutan whose range is believed to have included parts of India. This
change in species was made to make the film more fantastic, seeing as it would
be a good way to represent him as King of the Monkeys, and since orangutans are
not native to India. Despite this, the film does still feature some animals not
native to India, like Peccaries and Red-Eyed Tree Frogs.
Actor Neel Sethi said that since
he never actually worked with real animals onset during filming, director Jon Favreau would on
occasion stand in for where the animals would be present, one most notably as Shere
Khan lunging out from the tall grass.
All the locations in the film are
computer-generated VFX. The story may have been set primarily in India, but the
film was completely shot at the LA Center Studio in Los Angeles, California.
The CG character Baloo is so large
and furry, he took almost five hours of rendering time per frame.
This is the first time that Kaa the
snake is portrayed as a female, rather than a male. Jon Favreau said the
change was a deliberate one, as he felt there were too many male characters in The Jungle Book (1967).
Ben Kingsley described
Bagheera as a military character: "He's probably a colonel, he is
instantly recognizable by the way he talks, how he acts and what his ethical
code is."
The animal characters were both
motion-captured and performed live on set by puppeteers from the Jim Henson
Company. For the on-set performances, Jim Henson's Creature Shop built
elaborate life-sized puppets to act alongside Mowgli and serve as eye-lines.
The 3D of the film and the original
1990s Walt Disney Pictures opening logo were a tribute to the multi-plane
camera system. Director Jon Favreau
said that one his is "rules" for making The Jungle Book (2016) was
"let's treat the 3D like multi-plane. Let's be as gimmicky as Walt Disney would have
been-but not more." The multi-plane camera is a special camera used to
create a sense of dimensional space-of a camera moving through a set, instead
of one just taking photos of a series of still images. Disney had a special
version of the system developed, which was used first in the Silly Symphony
animated short film The Old Mill
(1937) and later in Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Favreau went on: "There are
tremendous shots in Pinocchio
(1940) and Bambi
(1942) where the multi-plane was a new technology and they were using it to
show off, and that was the 3D of its day. And so we were studying that very
closely and became very fascinated with the multi-plane and what went into it
and the artistry and ingenuity." This aesthetic philosophy extended to the
movie's treatment of the main castle logo. "I got the idea, 'Let's do the
opening logo, and instead of doing a super high-tech one, let's have a
hand-painted, cel-animated multi-plane logo,'" Favreau said. "And not
only that but 'Let's make the kingdom behind the castle have elements from what
the live action version would have been,' so it was almost like a little taste
of what's back there."
Right before he meets King Louie,
Mowgli finds a cowbell in the monkey palace and proceeds to pick it up and
shake it, causing Louie to appear. King Louie is played by Christopher Walken, who
once famously stated on a sketch on Saturday Night Live in 2000, "I have a
fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!"
The animal characters were created
entirely in key frame computer animation, with the assistance of footage of
real animal movement, the actors recording their lines, and performance capture
for reference. The production team underwent a thorough process to
realistically convey the animals' speaking, while still making them
perceptually believable to the audience. Favreau researched earlier films
featuring anthropomorphic animals - including Walt Disney's animated features,
such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937) and Bambi
(1942), as well as modern films such as Babe (1995) - and adopted
certain techniques from those films into The Jungle Book (2016).
Nearly 70 separate species of native animals are featured in the film, with
several species being portrayed as "150% larger" than their actual
counterparts. Jim Henson's
Creature Shop was brought in to provide animal puppet figures for Sethi to act
against, although none appear in the finished film. Director Jon Favreau expressed a
desire to avoid overusing motion capture in order to prevent an uncanny valley
effect. Moving Picture Company (MPC) and Weta Digital created the film's visual
effects. MPC developed a new software for animating muscular structure in the
animals. Around 1,000 remote jungle locations in India were photographed and
used as reference in post-production.
This is Idris Elba's second of
three starring roles in Disney films of 2016, following Zootopia (2016) and Finding Dory (2016). All
of the three films feature Elba in prominent animated voice-over performances.
Over 2,000 children auditioned for
the part of Mowgli, in his first audition, acting newcomer Neel Sethi won the part.
The first time King Louie appears
on the screen, he is sitting in a chair, his face obscured by shadows and talking
in a sinister, slightly muffled voice about offering Mowgli protection before
finally revealing his face. This is an obvious homage to the classic film Apocalypse Now (1979) in
which Marlon Brando's character,
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, first appears on screen similarly composed.
The end credits feature "The
Jungle Book" in book form that has the same cover design as the book seen
in the opening credits of The Jungle
Book (1967). It is in fact the original book prop, taken from
Disney's archives, as mentioned in the making of featurette.
