The Jungle Book
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.– Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden”
In attempting to distance themselves from Kipling’s racist views of indigenous peoples and British colonization/occupation of the same, as well as the conservative views of Walt Disney’s founding father as reflected in the values of the 1967 motion picture, Disney created a version of The Jungle Book which has no sense of the setting or culture of India.
A feral child, Mowgli (Neel Sethi), is raised by Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) and Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o), a mated pair of wolves, leaders of a pack coexisting in a truce with other animals of the jungle. When threatened by Shere Khan (Idris Elba), a wounded and hungry tiger distrustful of humans, Mowgli and his mentor, the panther cum narrator Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), decide that Mowgli must return to the world of his fellow humans.
The story follows Mowgli’s adventure as he is befriended by an opportunistic bear, Baloo (Bill Murray), preyed upon by a python (Scarlett Johansson in a trippy sequence that, thankfully, shelves the musical number for the end credits), and creeped out by a power-hungry Orangutan, King Louie (Christopher Walken, fulfilling his duty as the eccentric weirdo who shows up half-way through the picture). Aside from the murderous tiger, quaaludes-and-fog snake, gigantism-stricken primate singing an upbeat tune about assimilation in a maniacally-destructive rampage, this is totally a children’s movie… or not.
The computer generated animals look convincing, melding language with their natural facial movement, avoiding the uncanny valley but at the same time imbuing the grim story with a realism that some children might find unsettling. To wit: the woman sitting to my right spent the entire film consoling her child from one tragedy to the next. But, even and especially the unnervingly precocious child-actor Sethi, a Manhattanite billed as a real Indian (I’m a real Indian too, but my parents couldn’t afford private schools), takes me out of what’s supposed to be colonial India…. never mind the grey wolves, orangutans, jerboas and myriad other animals who don’t exist there. I like Sethi, and maybe he’d be perfect in a comedy about a precocious Indian-American who gets lost in the grid-layout of Manhattan only to be found by a scheming casting agent played by Joe Pesci. But here, his line readings and over pronounced body language has to be carried by the likes of Sir Ben of whose majestic enunciation the film seems undeserving and Murray who I was certain had sworn off acting aside CG cats. I had forgotten that paychecks can induce amnesia.
That said, the film is visual spectacle, to be sure. And one becomes invested in the fates of the characters, including Mowgli’s inquisitive pack-mate, Grey (Brighton Rose). The film creates a clear sense of right and wrong; violence and greed are blinding forces that threaten a delicate balance upon which all depend. More disturbing than any chase sequence is a moment where Shere Khan attempts to destabilize the wolf pack by gas-lighting the pups—Mowgli is an outsider usurping their den. As Shere Khan spins the lie, the terror in Raksha’s eyes is heart-breaking. In that sense, the film combats the kind of otherism perpetuated by Kipling and the Colonial aristocracy. Given the current sociopolitical climate of xenophobic vitriol, there’s substantial merit in instilling these values in the next generation that might, like Mowgli and his companions, rescue us from ourselves.