The Jungle Book
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Synopsis
Based on the Rudyard Kipling's classic novel of the same name, The Jungle Book follows young Mowgli on a fun-filled journey with unforgettable characters, including Bagheera, the wise panther, the jazzy King Louie, the hypnotic snake Kaa and the lovable, happy-go-lucky bear Baloo, who teaches Mowgli "The Bare Necessities" of life and the true meaning of friendship.
Picture 7/10
Disney’s The Jungle Book comes to Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio of about 1.75:1. The dual-layer disc presents the film with a new 1080p/24hz high-definition transfer.
I was significantly underwhelmed by the transfer. Disney’s transfers are usually hit or miss and I’m not sure why this is the case. Transfers made at different times? Different teams are responsible for each and they each come out with different results? Someone just forgets to flip a knob or flips too many during each restoration? I don’t know, but they can differ wildly from title to title and there’s no consistency. They had a horrendous batch months ago when they released The Sword in the Stone, Oliver and Company, and Robin Hood (though in fairness Robin Hood wasn’t too bad) but then right after they had a couple of nice looking titles with Winnie the Pooh and The Little Mermaid, the latter being especially good I thought.
So after those two why are we at the level of mediocrity we’re at now? Though The Jungle Book is nowhere near as bad as Oliver and Company and The Sword in the Stone it’s still absolutely bland. Yes, Disney has boosted colours, and they do look nice. Green is unsurprisingly the dominate colour and its rendering does look rather lovely. They’ve done plenty of noise reduction, though, giving a clean, polished look closer to a computer animation. There’s no sign this ever touched film.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, even though I like it when films that were made on film retain that filmic look, I get why Disney does this (I believe they want you to feel as though you’re looking right at the original cells themselves.) As long as there are no adverse effects on the finished product I’m fine with Disney filtering out noise and grain. They have done this well with a few releases but not so much here. On average it’s a pretty fuzzy looking picture. Background details are decent but not exceptional, but what frustrated me most were the characters and foreground objects. Lines look blurry and are rarely crisp, and close-ups look particularly underwhelming. This image never jumps out to me and just sort of sits there. Again it’s not the mosaic mess that is The Sword in the Stone but it’s nowhere near the crisp, clean (even more filmic) image that was The Little Mermaid. I don’t get why there is such a varying degree of quality between each title but it makes it frustrating every time I pop in one of Disney’s titles because who knows how it’s going to turn out. Consistency would be nice.
The Jungle Book - Screen Captures
Audio 8/10
Disney includes a remixed DTS-HD MA 7.1 surround track. Sound quality is excellent: the music sounds great, voice acting is clear, and there is no sign of damage or distortion. It’s clean.
The surround mix can overdo it here and there, though. The musical numbers fill out the environment decently enough and I didn’t find much to complain about there, but there are some sound effects that feel to be unnaturally pushed to the rears and stick out. Thankfully this is rare and most of the dialogue and effects stick to the fronts.
Also nice is Disney does include the original mono track, though it’s lossy Dolby Digital. Range is limited and fidelity isn’t as good, but at least feels more natural and audio quality is still excgoodellent. In the end it will ultimately come down to personal preference but I’m happy Disney at least includes the option.
Extras 7/10
Like every other deluxe edition Disney has released on Blu-ray they carry over most of the special features from the original DVD release (which are usually pretty good) and add on some new material (which is usually pretty awful and/or pointless.) We get more of the same here.
The new material starts off with a 10-minute video called Music, Memories, and Mowgli, a conversation between Richard M. Sherman, Diane Disney Miller, and Floyd Norman. It’s basically a quick reflection on the production, explaining how wonderful it was to work for Disney himself, and then talking about his death shortly before the film was finished and released. The only real benefit to the segment is a quick visit to the Disney vault to see some recently discovered artwork made for the film, and it’s possibly one of the last things Miller would have filmed (she passed away this past November) but it’s otherwise simply a summarization of the making-of documentary included elsewhere.
A 9-minute storyboard reconstruction of an alternate ending found in an early story treatment is the next feature. It ends in a similar manner to the film except Mowgli comes across a guard at a gate to a village. The ending that Disney ultimately felt was best (spoiler: being drawn to the village by the young girl he sees) was more appropriate for the “coming-of-age” story that the film essentially was.
And it wouldn’t be a Disney Blu-ray without the shameless advertisement. I Wan’na Be Like You is basically a (fairly obnoxious) 18-minute ad showcasing the latest attraction at Disney World, the “Animal Kingdom.” As far as I can tell it basically looks like a souped-up zoo. Yep, 18-minutes.
Disney yet again includes another karaoke feature, common for their Blu-rays now, this one called Bear-e-Oke (natch!) and it delivers an animated karaoke presentation for a number of songs in the film for about 13-minutes. This is also what plays when you pause the film (I, like my daughter, can’t understand why Disney just can’t “pause” the film.)
@DisneyAnimation: Sparking Creativity is actually the only decent new supplement in the bunch. This 9-minute feature gives us another look at the animation department of the studio, focusing on their Spark program. The Spark program is where animators come up with new, innovative ideas and then share them with other animators and executives, and I assume being awarded or compensated if the idea is valid enough. We get a sampling of two of the submissions: a new motion capture technique that was used for the effects in Frozen, and then a new look for computer animated films, which was used for the award winning short Paperman (anybody else find it odd that in the last few years Disney themselves has been far more innovative and interesting than Pixar in computer animation?) There’s a couple of other things brought up, like a flash mob moment I didn’t quite understand, but it’s easily the best feature of all of the new material.
Disney then includes most of the content from the original DVD in the section aptly labeled “Classic DVD Bonus Features.” A sub section called “Backstage Disney” first presents The Bare Necessities: The Making of The Jungle Book, a 46-minute documentary covering the development of the film. These are usually pretty good and informative, and this is no different, but you can basically follow these with a check list now: get rights to classic story. Check. Go through months, maybe years of story development. Check. Get voices. Check. Animate. Check. Write music. Check. Release film to public. Check. Sometimes serious issues arise (like with The Little Mermaid) but the development of this film was fairly straightforward, except Disney was more involved with this one after the failure of The Sword in the Stone. He really didn’t want the writers to know much of anything about the Rudyard Kipling story other than the basics, wanting them to concentrate on just making some interesting characters for Mowgli to interact with (though Disney himself apparently turned to the story many times for influences.) Of course the one sad fact about the film is that Disney passed away before the film was anywhere near finished, never seeing a finished print. Ultimately it’s good making-of, but really follows the motions of these types of featurettes.
Disney’s Kipling: Walt’s Magic Touch on a Literary Classic is a 15-minute featurette on how Disney altered the original source heavily to fit his vision. Interestingly the segment covers some material that was in original treatments, a lot of which was closer to the source. There’s also more insight on trying to give the story a more central focus so that they could rely less on plot. Disney seemed determined to make the film simply a collection of kooky characters for Mowgli to interact with, and thankfully they did cut out one called Rocky the Rhino. It’s interesting in looking at Disney’s vision, but somewhat frustrating when you realize he didn’t actually have much interest in actually adapting the story.
The Lure of The Jungle Book is a 9-minute collection of interviews with Disney animators (current at the time this was filmed) talking about how the film and its animation influenced them. It’s pointed out how Sheer Khan’s mannerisms made their way into Scar in The Lion King (with Jeremy Irons doing George Sanders I guess) and how the free flowing movement of Mowgli has made its way into other animated films. The segment turns into one of the strong features as it ends up offering a great examination of the film’s animation and techniques.
Mowgli’s Return to the Wild is a 5-minute segment featuring Bruce Reitherman, son of animator/director Wolfgang Reitherman, and the voice of Mowgli. Reitherman talks about the film and his father, while also talking about his current profession, that of a wildlife filmmaker.
We then get an interesting archival feature, that of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston talking about animating the characters and giving them personalities. They also talk about studying live action and poses, and the importance of the character’s eyes. It’s short but fairly illuminating.
That closes off the “Backstage Disney” section but there are still a few other features. There is 6-minutes’ worth of deleted scenes, presented with storyboards and newly recorded voice acting. We get to see Rocky the Rhino’s rightfully deleted scene and then a deleted musical number involving the vultures, making their Beatles influence more obvious.
Disney offers a 14-minute feature on the animals and settings that appear in the film, called Disneypedia: Junglemania!. It’s aimed more for kids, providing easy to digest information on India, bears, panthers, tigers, pythons, and so on. It’s a decent educational feature.
”Music & More” presents a couple of more musically themed features. Common on Disney’s releases is the Disney Song Selection, which allows you to jump to any of the film’s musical numbers, complete with subtitles for the lyrics. There is then the I Wan’na Be Like You music video performed by the Jonas Brothers. I only got through 30-seconds of the 3-minute video.
There’s a decent audio commentary closing off the supplements, which presents Sherman, Bruce Reitherman, and artist Andreas Deja talking about the development of the film and Disney’s involvement. There’s also some archival audio interviews edited in, backing up some comments or possibly filling in some dead space. I think everything covered in here is covered elsewhere so it’s not a necessary feature, but it’s a decent track that flows nicely and has quite a bit of content.
And that closes off the disc’s supplements. Not entirely surprising, but the old material is the worthwhile content here. Save for the new feature on the animators the rest of the material feels like filler or shameless advertising.
Closing
It’s a fairly bland release when you get right down to it. The film’s a charmer for sure, probably one of the better Disney films during the time period, and so it’s a shame that it feels like little effort was put into this release. The transfer is okay but it’s fuzzy and over-processed. Its supplements are decent enough, but most of the new material feels like filler. Fairly underwhelming.
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