Lure of the past
Mark Steyn
The Jungle Book 2 12, selected cinemas
rrhe spectacle of various Congressional shills for Disney demanding indefinite extension of the company's copyrights was never very edifying. But it's given a particular grotesqueness by the Mouse's abuse of its own characters: no copyright thief could do as lousy a job on these properties as Disney itself has done with Mickey's recent appearances or Piglet's Big Movie. Now it's the turn of Mowgli and co. to get the not-quite-straight-to-video treatment.
The Jungle Book was the last film to be personally supervised by Uncle Walt, and by most accounts he saved the movie. In an effort to be true to Kipling, the picture had somehow got mired in a dark animation style that Walt thought was a turn-off: he threw out the drawings and all but one of the Terry Gilkyson songs (Tear Necessities'), brought in the Sherman brothers (hot from Maly Poppins) to do a new score and ordered up a lighter touch. It's not Kipling, but it's a great movie in its own right, with a starry cast — George Sanders as Shere Khan — and the singing characters rendered by Phil Harris and Louis Prima as animal versions of their nightclub acts (in Prima's case, make that 'slightly more animal). The songs were strong enough to make it the first animated film score to earn a gold record, and to ensure the animated Jungle Book worked on its own terms, as a quirky variation on its source material. Walt evidently knew what he was doing: he died in 1966, before the film was released, and the company didn't make another first-rate animated musical feature in the next two decades.
Thirty-six years later, somebody figured it was time for a sequel. Jungle Book 2 isn't one of those Return To Neverland deals: Mowgli's not a middle-aged Indian computer programmer working in California when he hears that Shere Khan has escaped from the San Diego Zoo. Instead, JB2 picks up five minutes after the end of the original, when, as you may recall, the man cub's eye is caught by the flashing brown eyes of a comely lass and he goes off to the 'man village'. An overture reprises the hits from the first movie, as Mowgli stages a shadow puppet show for his new family recreating his adventures with Baloo and Baghera. But his adoptive parents are concerned. They've noticed that. whenever Mowgli, his kid brother Ranjan and the little cutie Shanti venture out of the stockade to get water from the river, the man cub feels the urge to scamper back into the jungle. The fact that they keep going to the river for water when there's a village well visible in one of the backgrounds is either a continuity error or the first sign that something's amiss. 'You can take the boy out of the jungle,' sighs dad. 'But you can't take the jungle out of the boy,' says mom.
That's the entire plot in one line, but just in case you didn't get it the first song — 'Feel The Jungle Rhythm' — spells it out. Meanwhile, out in the greenery, Shere Khan is fed up getting ribbed by the vultures for having been thrashed by some 40lb kid, and Baloo is all mopey at not having his `L'il Britches' to duet with, and before you know it bear and boy have hooked up and they're both trying to stay one step ahead of the tiger. Almost as soon as Mowgli's catapulted back into the jungle, he and Baloo are doing 'Bear Necessities' — not just a reprise of the number but a reprise of the routine: picking a pawpaw, floating down the river. etc. John Goodman does a spirited vocal recreation of Phil Harris — no mean achievement — but manages to vary the phrasing just enough to make it seem, for a moment, as if the film is going to take the spirit of the original and use it as a springboard to new heights and new delights.
Instead, that's it. All the old gang are here — Kaa the snake, the four moptopped Liverpudlian vultures, Colonel Hathi and his elephants — but, aside from one bit of business involving Kaa and an involuntarily swallowed rock, nobody does anything and, aside from ever more perfunctory reprises of 'Bear Necessities', nobody sings anything. JB2 is a sequel pared down to the bare necessities: the one song and the anonymous vocal mimicry of the distinctive originals — Harris, Sanders, Sebastian Cabot — make it less of a follow-up and more like a karaoke precis of the first film. The only innovation of director Steve Trenbirth and his half-dozen writers is to add a fifth vulture, voiced by Phil Collins. If anyone involved with this project ever worried about matching the zany inventiveness, memorable music and character comedy of the original, they apparently got over it pretty quickly. There's no pretence, 0 best beloved, that this knock-off has any chance of being either best or beloved.
I said all the gang were back. There's one who isn't: Louis Prima's King Louis. There's a theory that he was dumped as payback to his widow, who's sued Disney for DVD royalties on Jungle Book. It's less of a punishment than a lucky escape, and the absence of the pyromaniacal hipster only underlines the real problem: this Jungle doesn't swing.
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