The Jungle Book

On the data. Nine things, and only one pair of them is an actual sequence. Kipling published The Jungle Book in 1894 and a second collection in 1895. Between them they hold eight Mowgli stories, and they are not in order: the first book jumps from his childhood to his adulthood and back. The rest of both collections is about other animals entirely, which is why Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a mongoose story, keeps turning up in adaptations that have nothing else in common. The 1967 Disney film is the one that matters commercially, and it is barely an adaptation. Walt Disney handed the writers a copy of the book and told them not to read it, because the previous attempt at a faithful treatment had come out far too dark. What is left is a hangout film with songs. It was the last feature he worked on. He died in December 1966 and it opened the following October, and it was a huge success that steadied the studio for years. After that everything splits. The 1994 live-action film is a Disney production that shares nothing with the cartoon and makes Mowgli an adult. Jungle Cubs and TaleSpin are television shows using the same animals, and TaleSpin is about a cargo pilot in the 1930s, which is as far from Kipling as anything has ever got. The Jungle Book 2, in 2003, is the only direct sequel to the 1967 film. Then in 2016 and 2018 two live-action versions arrived nearly together, from rival studios. Favreau's for Disney is a remake of the cartoon with the same songs and the same shape, made almost entirely inside a computer, and it took close to a billion dollars. Serkis's for Warner Bros. went back to Kipling's harder material, lost the race, and was sold to Netflix. Both are good. They are not for the same audience, and putting Serkis's on for a six-year-old is a mistake. One thing to know about the 1967 film: King Louie, an orangutan singing in a jazz idiom about wanting to be human, has long been read as a racial caricature. The argument is live rather than settled, and the 2016 film changed the character considerably.

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