Every Version of The Jungle Book

Walt Disney died before the 1967 film was completed, and his last instruction to the animators was reportedly to ignore the book entirely. The resulting film is almost nothing like Kipling: the tone is light, the songs are infectious, and the whole thing runs 78 minutes. It should not work as well as it does. But the voice cast (Phil Harris, Sebastian Cabot, George Sanders as Shere Khan) is exceptional, the Sherman Brothers and Terry Gilkyson songs have not dated, and the film has genuine warmth. Generations of children saw it first and never quite needed another version. That is not a failing; it is exactly what a crowd-pleasing adaptation is supposed to do.

The bear necessities argument runs both ways: a film that strips out Kipling's colonialism and his darker wolfish politics in favour of jazz numbers is doing something deliberate. But what it replaces them with is real craft, not just commercial sentimentality.

The Netflix version sat unreleased for two years after Disney's 2016 film made a photorealistic Jungle Book look commercially risky. That delay hurt its reputation unfairly. Serkis's film is genuinely darker: Mowgli is a confused child caught between species rather than a plucky hero, the wolves are tribal and political, and Shere Khan is frightening rather than entertaining. It draws on the parts of Kipling's text the Disney version set aside entirely. It is not a children's film in the comfortable sense, and that is exactly its point.

The motion-capture performances carry weight that the 2016 CGI zoo never quite managed, and the film's willingness to sit with Mowgli's grief and displacement rather than resolve it into triumph is its real distinction.

The Jungle Book 2 had the difficult job of continuing the 1967 film with a reduced budget and without the Sherman Brothers. It manages neither the original's warmth nor any new ideas of its own. Mowgli returns to the jungle, Baloo is there, Shere Khan returns as the villain, and nothing of consequence happens. The songs are weak imitations of the originals. It exists because sequels to Disney classics were commercially reliable in the early 2000s, and that is the entirety of the reason.