Jungle Book Film Critique

Jungle Book

By Walt Disney 1967

This is an animated musical movie about a boy abandon in a jungle when he was a baby. The baby is found by a panther named Bagheera and taken to a pack of wolves. In the next scene the baby is a boy of about age 8 and playing in the jungle. The three main characters are a boy called Mowgli,a panther called Bagheer and a bear called Baloo. The plot of the film is to remove Mowgli from the jungle because the tiger named Shere Khan wants to kill him. So Baloo and Bagheera are trying to get Mowgli out of the Jungle and in the process Mowgli runs away and meets other animals and learns to fight and not trust other animals in the jungle.

Mowgli’s first encounter was with a snake named Kaa who tries to hypnotize him in order to eat him, but along comes Bagheera and fights with the snake and Mowgli runs away. Next comes a very charming exciting scene of elephants marching and singing. Mowgli meets a baby elephant and starts marching behind them, very cute, until the father of the elephants yells at Mowgli, “No man cubs allowed in the Jungle.” So once again Mowgli is sent away. With his head down he leaves the elephants. This continues throughout the movie as Mowgli tries to find his place in the Jungle. However Bagheer and Baloo are still trying to find him to get him out of the jungle because the tiger is also trying to find Mowgli to kill him. During each encounter that Mowgli has with a group of animals there is fighting, even though the animals are set on fire, thrown into trees they get back up and run away. After a fighting scene, Mowgli and Baloo are singing and dancing, spinning each other around, laughing and showing the love of friendship they share. Then comes a group of Monkeys and snatches up Mowgli and takes him away. They throw Mowgli all over the jungle like he’s a rag doll.

Finally Baloo and Bagheer meet up with Mowgli and tell him he must leave the jungle now and go to the man village or he will be killed by the tiger Shere Khan. Mowgli says, “No” that he is a bear like Baloo and will stay in the jungle. Baloo tells Mowgli, “No you’re human”, and “you must go to the man village.” So as they walk towards the edge of the jungle Mowgli hears a girl singing. He peeks through the bushes and see a young girls fetching water in a water jug. He’s so memorized by her beauty that he runs towards her and that’s it, end of story.

This movie may influence our children in a negative way as it contained a lot of violence with Mowgli’s adventure through the jungle. Also Mowgli was bullied by the vultures and in order for Mowgli to stay in the jungle he had to become an animal to fit in. Most of the animals in the movie were mean and wanted to either eat Mowgli or kill him. The one animal that wanted to be Mowgli’s friend was the baby elephant and that ended when his father said no. Mowgli was dressed like a poor child, as he had on little clothing that appeared to be some short of underwear or diaper. His hair was straight shoulder length, and his skin was dark and he had large eyes. As for stereotypical, Mowgli was another orphan child of a Disney movie character. The girl in this movie was used to attract Mowgli to get him out of the jungle. Her beauty and voice worked as he ran after her.



What do others think?

“Through the Jungle by Richard Bowden –”The characterizations is bold and colorful, the song are memorable, the music is evocative, even if in my humble opinion not outstanding, but still perfectly adequate. There's something about the characterization in the jungle book, whether consciously contrived or not, that gets the liberal antennae twitching, Louis Prima, although Italian, sings like a black and his monkey-man (“I wanna be like you…”) routine is rather disturbing. The Jungle-bum ’Baloo speaks for his stereotypical jive-talking self. In contrast to these types, creatures with dignity and power, like Shere Khan or Bagheera, tend to have upper class “English accents clearly implying class and authority. Closely following on this question mark follows the question of women- or rather the absence of them as power figures.”

http://www.dowse.com/movies/junglebook_article.html

I agree by giving the characters English accents it made them appear to be upper class, but I don’t think children would catch this. However, I didn’t notice the Italian man speaking like a black person. As for a woman in the movie there was one and she was in the elephant parade. She was a strong women as she confronted Col. Hathi when he told the panther they would not help find Mowgli, she convinced the Col. Hathi by saying, “what if that was your boy lost?” This film did fall into some of Disney's stereotypical roles such as the males were dominate and very mean and self-serving. The boy was an orphan, Mowgli lacked clothing and appeared to be black, but his hair did not seem to be typical black type hair, but maybe Indian. The female was used as a ploy to get Mowgli to leave the jungle and clearly it worked. The song the girl sang was that of typical female of fetching water, marrying a handsome man, cooking and having children.