Movie commentary

Perhaps the biggest attraction of The Jungle Book (2016, USA) is its computer generated imagery.

The visuals are wide, lush and beautiful. It’s rich and realistic state-of-the-art visuals. The animals are like ‘true’ animals.

The jungle is as real as can-be, like watching the jungle on safari.

Elephants, monkeys, and bears are around and you can almost feel them brush by you.

You don’t worry about losing your life in the jaws of a bear because you are actually sitting down in the cinema.

It is a rare visual experience indeed as it is that close to reality.

The Jungle Book has themes of imperialism and colonization, and it is a fable or moral lesson, but the human interest story is what the audience experience, especially the target audience of children, as well as the visual experience.

There is a natural fascination with the central character Mowgli (Neel Sethi), a boy raised by wolves who becomes a ‘man cub’.

Mowgli does not know a life any better than the one he has, but the audience can imagine that Mowgli is abandoned. We all experience that feeling somehow and we are all afraid to be lost. The abandonment part touches us though Mowgli may have never felt it.

It seems Mowgli has got on well with the family who adopted him, the wolves.

There is also fascination with a human raised by animals. How a human could be raised by one is cause for wonder because it is beyond our experience.

A mean tiger Shere Kahn (voice of Idris Elba) wants to eliminate Mowgli; the tiger knows that a grown human would overtake the tiger and gain ascendancy over it.

As the laws of the jungle come to settle, Mowgli must fight to survive if he is to stay with his family.

Will Mowgli escape the tiger and leave his family of wolves? Will he go and be with the humans instead? This is not only a plot, but an issue of identity.

Mowgli struggles to decide if he will stay or go, to be with the wolves or the humans, and to be human or wolf. But he is told he is human–does Mowgli understand? 

When you look at The Jungle Book closely, it illuminates the human condition intimately. It illuminates Mowgli’s dilemma.

In the theater, we share that emotional journey, even if the delivery leaves something to be desired.