Saturday Evening Cartoons: The Jungle Book (1967)

Those of you who were following my blog back in 2016 may recall that I really liked the remake of The Jungle Book though I had never seen the original animated film at the time. Well I've finally gotten around to it...

     The Jungle Book was released October 18th, 1967. Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman (One Hundred and One Dalmatians) and produced by Walt Disney himself, it is the last animated feature the storied mogul was involved in.

     Having seen the remake and read the Rudyard Kipling stories first, I can't help but compare this film to that. Like the book it's more episodic then the live action version. It's also less dark then either. The film's original writer, Bill Peet, wanted to follow the book much more closely and the first draft of the script was much more dark and violent. Walt was not happy with this and eventually he fired Peet and told the new writer, Larry Clemmons, not to read the book at all. He wanted a more straightforward narrative and a more family friendly story, which is what the film delivers.

     Although, as I said, this film is more episodic then the remake it does use Bagheera's quest to get Mowgli to the man village, and Mowgli's reluctance to leave, as the through line to tie the story together. Along the way Mowgli meets a variety of colorful jungle characters including Kaa the Python (voiced by Winnie the Pooh himself, Sterling Holloway), King Louie (Louis Prima) and his pack of mischievous monkeys, Colonel Hathi (J. Pat O'Malley), an elephant who fancies himself a military colonel and leads a patrol of elephants through the jungle, the vicious tiger Shere Khan (George Sanders), and of course the carefree bear Baloo (Phil Harris). In the end it's not a realization that he has become a man that leads Mowgli back to the man-village (as in the book) but a chance meeting with a village girl, with who Mowgli becomes immediately smitten. This is certainly less psychologically complex then Kipling's story but it works for this film and it has universal resonance.

     The characters really are the best thing about this movie and all of them are memorable and entertaining to watch. The friendship between Baloo, Bagheera and Mowgli is really charming and I like how they remain friends despite their differences in the end. Shere Khan somehow manages to be one of Disney's more menacing villains despite appearing in maybe a third of the movies runtime. The animation, though certainly not the most creative the studio has done, is quite good. The unique way each different animal moves and the amount of expressiveness the animators are able to pull from that movement is really impressive.

     The Sherman brothers work here is not among their best but the songs in The Jungle Book are still uniformly good. The one that really stands out is "I Wan'na Be like You" though this is probably more for Louis Prima and Phil Harris' vocals then anything else. The film's best song was not written by the Sherman's but by Terry Gilkyson who had written a whole bunch of songs but, like Bill Peet, was removed from the project when Disney found his material too dark. "The Bare Necessities" is the only of his songs that survived and is rightfully a classic.

     The Jungle Book is a solid entry in the Disney animated canon. Though I don't love how he treated the source material I can respect old Walt for putting so much personal care and attention into the films his studio put out and this is a fitting final film for the great producer who died in December 1966 ten months before this film was released.

Score: 8/10