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Jungle Book
Sep. 4th, 2016 03:23 pmThis afternoon, thanks to Picturehouse's current 'Vintage Sundays' series of animated film screenings, I got to see Disney's 1967 Jungle Book on the big screen for the first time.*
I remember watching it on video a fair bit as a kid, though I don't remember particularly liking it. There was something unsatisfying about it; in retrospect I think it may have been how it was just a loosely assembled collection of episodes strung along a 'must return Mowgli to the Man Village' throughline rather than anything that builds drama or character. I liked the tune of the girl's song at the end, but I didn't like her or her unsettling coquettishness (she's what, eight? even as a small child I knew that was wrong) and I didn't understand why Mowgli had to go live with the humans when anyone would be better off with animals. I also didn't understand why there was jazz in the jungle, or the Beatles, or why the animals had English accents and Mowgli sounded like Beaver Cleaver. And I thought the art style rather too anaemic for depicting a jungle. I think the last time I watched the film all the way through was in high school, but it stuck with me so little I'm not sure.
In the intervening years, I've learned a lot about animation, worked at Disney and learned about its history, and picked up the requisite historical pop-culture background knowledge, as well as some awareness of uncomfortable racial undertones, the British presence in India, and Kipling's motivation for writing the stories. On watching the film again, this did help – though I also wondered if perhaps I knew more about the latter two than the people who made it did.
I knew that coming in with this adult perspective was going to change the film for me; I also knew that seeing it in the cinema would make a big difference, though I didn't know what to expect from that. ( Here is how it went )
Luckily the emotional side, which had left me so cold as a child, has been saved by an external force: not to deliver any spoilers, but the finale of Cabin Pressure makes allusion to Jungle Book, and because the former handles character arcs and emotional lives so much better than the latter, all I had to do was graft in the feelings as instructed and voilà! Some semblance of depth. Pure pixie dust.
Next week is The Little Mermaid ... I actually know people who worked on that one, should be interesting in an entirely different way ...
*Perhaps not strictly true: I was born at the end of the era in which Disney periodically re-released classic films, and I know my parents took me to a few of those, though I don't particularly remember Jungle Book being one of them.
I remember watching it on video a fair bit as a kid, though I don't remember particularly liking it. There was something unsatisfying about it; in retrospect I think it may have been how it was just a loosely assembled collection of episodes strung along a 'must return Mowgli to the Man Village' throughline rather than anything that builds drama or character. I liked the tune of the girl's song at the end, but I didn't like her or her unsettling coquettishness (she's what, eight? even as a small child I knew that was wrong) and I didn't understand why Mowgli had to go live with the humans when anyone would be better off with animals. I also didn't understand why there was jazz in the jungle, or the Beatles, or why the animals had English accents and Mowgli sounded like Beaver Cleaver. And I thought the art style rather too anaemic for depicting a jungle. I think the last time I watched the film all the way through was in high school, but it stuck with me so little I'm not sure.
In the intervening years, I've learned a lot about animation, worked at Disney and learned about its history, and picked up the requisite historical pop-culture background knowledge, as well as some awareness of uncomfortable racial undertones, the British presence in India, and Kipling's motivation for writing the stories. On watching the film again, this did help – though I also wondered if perhaps I knew more about the latter two than the people who made it did.
I knew that coming in with this adult perspective was going to change the film for me; I also knew that seeing it in the cinema would make a big difference, though I didn't know what to expect from that. ( Here is how it went )
Luckily the emotional side, which had left me so cold as a child, has been saved by an external force: not to deliver any spoilers, but the finale of Cabin Pressure makes allusion to Jungle Book, and because the former handles character arcs and emotional lives so much better than the latter, all I had to do was graft in the feelings as instructed and voilà! Some semblance of depth. Pure pixie dust.
Next week is The Little Mermaid ... I actually know people who worked on that one, should be interesting in an entirely different way ...
*Perhaps not strictly true: I was born at the end of the era in which Disney periodically re-released classic films, and I know my parents took me to a few of those, though I don't particularly remember Jungle Book being one of them.
