Jungle Book
Sep. 4th, 2016 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinThis 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.
In the animation world there's a certain fetishization of some of the work of this period, so I've seen clips dozens of times as teachers enthused over the genius of the people who animated them. I was looking forward to seeing this on the big screen, where the drawings can be truly appreciated. There is some really outstanding animation in Jungle Book, that can't be denied, and some drawings that look absolutely fabulous on the big screen. But seen up close and personal, some of it doesn't hold up too well, and that's the good stuff – there's a lot of uninspired filler as well. Many scenes in more modern films equal or surpass the work in Jungle Book, but never get mentioned by the gatekeepers of animation tradition, I assume because they were done by people they know rather than people they can idealise in retrospect.
One very pleasant artistic surprise, though, was the backgrounds: far from being the washed-out line-and-watercolour things I remembered from the VHS, they were quick but ample gouache paintings, much more saturated than I remember and rather pleasant to look at in their own right. VHS tapes and cathode-ray TVs** are notorious for messing up colour and contrast, so I should have known what I'd be seeing was going to be more than just a higher-resolution version of what I'd seen before, but I'm grateful it was the surprise it was, as every sequence brought new gifts.
*The name for the way North American TVs were calibrated (refresh rate and display) was NTSC; I can never remember what those letters actually stood for, but it was a running joke in the industry that it was "Never The Same Colour." Modern flat-screen LCD TVs are an entirely different animal, and with DVDs and Blu-Rays you get a much more accurate reproduction of what the filmmakers intended.
The story, on the other hand, left me scratching my head just as much as it had done before, albeit for different reasons. With adult knowledge and historical hindsight I understood some of the things that had confused me when I was small, but was newly bemused by other things which hadn't struck my younger self as odd. Prime among these was Bagheera's behaviour, which didn't seem to hang together at all. It basically goes like this:
It would have been one thing if that was an act Bagheera was putting on, and secretly followed Mowgli making sure he was OK, but he heads off in the opposite direction without even the slightest crisis of conscience. How much is the word of Bagheera worth and why do the other animals take him at all seriously? And he doesn't do this just the once, he keeps doing this. You can tell, because they reuse the animation.
The disconnected feel of the movie hasn't improved with time, either, though I can say now from an informed perspective that it feels like a movie led by the animation department rather than story, and the 'animator's animator', at that, not 'actors with pencils'– so much of it seems to be predicated on 'this would be fun to move around' rather than getting into the heads and hearts of the characters. Hence the jazz club in the jungle, and the songs which do nothing to advance the story or characters but do provide a fine platform for mucking about. I can see why animators' animators of today hold it in such high regard. For someone who bemoans the hegemony of plot-driven Story in the world of animated films these days, it was a salient lesson in what can go wrong without someone at the wheel who has a strong sense of storytelling priorities and how to serve the Big Picture of the film.
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.
In the animation world there's a certain fetishization of some of the work of this period, so I've seen clips dozens of times as teachers enthused over the genius of the people who animated them. I was looking forward to seeing this on the big screen, where the drawings can be truly appreciated. There is some really outstanding animation in Jungle Book, that can't be denied, and some drawings that look absolutely fabulous on the big screen. But seen up close and personal, some of it doesn't hold up too well, and that's the good stuff – there's a lot of uninspired filler as well. Many scenes in more modern films equal or surpass the work in Jungle Book, but never get mentioned by the gatekeepers of animation tradition, I assume because they were done by people they know rather than people they can idealise in retrospect.
One very pleasant artistic surprise, though, was the backgrounds: far from being the washed-out line-and-watercolour things I remembered from the VHS, they were quick but ample gouache paintings, much more saturated than I remember and rather pleasant to look at in their own right. VHS tapes and cathode-ray TVs** are notorious for messing up colour and contrast, so I should have known what I'd be seeing was going to be more than just a higher-resolution version of what I'd seen before, but I'm grateful it was the surprise it was, as every sequence brought new gifts.
*The name for the way North American TVs were calibrated (refresh rate and display) was NTSC; I can never remember what those letters actually stood for, but it was a running joke in the industry that it was "Never The Same Colour." Modern flat-screen LCD TVs are an entirely different animal, and with DVDs and Blu-Rays you get a much more accurate reproduction of what the filmmakers intended.
The story, on the other hand, left me scratching my head just as much as it had done before, albeit for different reasons. With adult knowledge and historical hindsight I understood some of the things that had confused me when I was small, but was newly bemused by other things which hadn't struck my younger self as odd. Prime among these was Bagheera's behaviour, which didn't seem to hang together at all. It basically goes like this:
WOLVES: Mowgli needs to return to the Man Village.
BAGHEERA: Yes, yes he does. I will take him there.
WOLVES: Will you, though?
BAGHEERA: Yes, I give you my word as Bagheera.
WOLVES: Good enough for us, faithful and trustworthy Bagheera. Take Mowgli to the Man Village.
Bagheera and Mowgli walk through the jungle for, like, an hour.
MOWGLI: I don't wanna go to the Man Village.
BAGHEERA: Too bad. I have given my word as Bagheera.
Mowgli is kind of annoying in a completely expected little-kid way for like 30 seconds
BAGHEERA: OMG I am totally DONE with you! Fine! Do your own thing then!
It would have been one thing if that was an act Bagheera was putting on, and secretly followed Mowgli making sure he was OK, but he heads off in the opposite direction without even the slightest crisis of conscience. How much is the word of Bagheera worth and why do the other animals take him at all seriously? And he doesn't do this just the once, he keeps doing this. You can tell, because they reuse the animation.
The disconnected feel of the movie hasn't improved with time, either, though I can say now from an informed perspective that it feels like a movie led by the animation department rather than story, and the 'animator's animator', at that, not 'actors with pencils'– so much of it seems to be predicated on 'this would be fun to move around' rather than getting into the heads and hearts of the characters. Hence the jazz club in the jungle, and the songs which do nothing to advance the story or characters but do provide a fine platform for mucking about. I can see why animators' animators of today hold it in such high regard. For someone who bemoans the hegemony of plot-driven Story in the world of animated films these days, it was a salient lesson in what can go wrong without someone at the wheel who has a strong sense of storytelling priorities and how to serve the Big Picture of the film.
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.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-05 03:32 pm (UTC)I adored the soundtrack and listened to it repeatedly, like small children do. This was back before VHS tapes. I didn't see the movie again for years, until I got the tape for my own kids. I still liked the music and still thought that going with the girl at the end was a dumb idea.