Disney's new Jungle Book

[Brian G Turner]

The trailer surprised me. I may just have to watch this film, after all.

 

[hopewrites]

"Christopher Walken" -King Louie
"Bill Murray" -Baloo

 

[Mark Ragland]

The trailer looks fabulous.

 

[Dangur]

The movie looks great, I will definably see this in the Imax.

 

[Vaz]

Been Hyped for this ever since hearing about it, Scarlett Johansen as Kaa great casting for this movie

 

[Brian G Turner]

I did enjoy this film, with reservations.

Though the animals were all wonderfully animated, there was always something about them that always said "CGI" which took away from the suspension of disbelief. The result is that even an old film such as Babe actually looks like it has better effects much of the time.

Before seeing the film, I did hope they'd retained some of the songs. However, the reboot is so dark by comparison to the old animated adventure, that when the couple of songs that were retained came up, they seemed completely out of place. For example, in the original animated classic, "Bear Necessities" is part of a story during the singing. In the reboot, it was simply a static scene with the same two verses repeated. And when Christopher Walken turns up as King Louis he's so dark and foreboding and genuinely frightening that the moment the banjo and jazz band strikes up, it's just so completely at odds with the established atmosphere.

There is also the odd point that every speaking character seemed to be a Hollywood megastar. Did they serious think they couldn't cast this film outside of the same 30 leading actors Hollywood has been using this decade?

Aside from that, Mowgli was superbly acted, it was a decent story, and very entertaining. One of the year's better films, but I'm not sure the obvious CGI animation is going to allow this to age very well.