The appeal of the film’s hyper-reality is foregrounded from the very beginning, as a traditionally hand-drawn animated Disney logo slowly but surely gives way to a lush jungle that is no less animated, although to most eyes (including my own) will look entirely real. From that moment on the film is in motion, as we immediately begin tracking Mowgli, a child who has been raised in the jungle by a wolf pack and a black panther, racing along the forest floor, leaping in and around trees and stones. It sets the pace and tone of the film, which is intensely action-oriented, but not at the expense of character and emotion. What is perhaps most surprising about The Jungle Book is that, despite the manufactured world in which it takes place, Favreau (Iron Man, Chef) is able to sell the drama and the interpersonal (or interanimal) connections. Neel Sethi, an unknown child actor making his big-screen debut, isn’t always entirely convincing, especially when more subtle emotions are required, but he nonetheless provides a solid grounding for the film’s fantastical world of talking animals and mythic jungle lore. He’s no Jackie Coogan or Enzo Staiola, but those kids were never faced with being the only flesh-and-blood being before the camera, performing in a vacuum—an endeavor that has nearly swallowed seasoned actors.

The thrust of the narrative, adapted by screenwriter Justin Marks (whose only previous credits are a Street Fighter sequel and a made-for-television movie), follows closely with Kipling’s story. Mowgli, who has been protected by Akela (Giancarlo Esposito), the head of the wolf pack, Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o), his adopted mother, and Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), the black panther that first found him abandoned in the jungle as an infant, is targeted by Shere Khan (Idris Elba), a particularly vicious tiger whose past violent experiences with humankind have soured him on the idea (apparently okay with all the other animals) of a human child being raised in the jungle. He is, in his own way, a reactionary nativist who seethes at the idea of a human being accepted within the animal realm, which is intriguing given that Kipling’s stories have been roundly criticized for decades for their racist, colonial outlook (a Brit born and raised in Bombay, Kipling was a literal product of colonialism who coined the term “white man’s burden”). There have been attempts to brand The Jungle Book as similarly racist, with fingers pointed in particular at its evocation of humankind as the clearly superior species and suggestion that the animals are stand-ins for inferior races.

Such arguments are largely subverted by Favreau’s film, which contrary to Kipling’s ideology, is less about celebrating brute strength than it is about the importance of drawing together and maintaining peace in the face of ruthless animosity (Katy Waldman has made a strong argument for the film’s progressivism over at Slate). Shere Khan is without doubt the most powerful animal in the film, but he is a clear villain because he hunts and kills for sport and lords his power over others; in other words, power in and of itself is not good. That Mowgli eventually defeats Shere Khan (no real spoiler there) is less about his superiority as a human who can create and innovate tools and traps than it is about his collective standing with the other jungle animals, whose support and sacrifice enables him to fight and also helps to alleviate the destruction he causes when he inadvertently sets the jungle on fire. Although Mowgli ends the film clearly stronger and more powerful than he was at the beginning, there is also a sense of humility in his being a part of a larger whole, rather than a lord over others.

Favreau also pulls a few neat tricks in adapting favorite aspects of the 1967 Disney film, which was goofier and a musical to boot, without sacrificing the new film’s striving toward a more intense realism. Baloo the bear, voiced with the unmistakable comic dexterity of Bill Murray, is once again a major character and even sings a bit of the classic ditty “The Bear Necessities,” and while he provides healthy doses of comic relief, he is never a joke in and of himself. Similarly, King Louie, an orangutan who tries to force Mowgli to teach him the secrets of fire so he can be on par with humankind, has been reimagined as a fantastical giant who, rather than speaking in Louis Armstrong-esque jazz colloquialisms (which were naturally read as racist), speaks in Christopher Walken’s jaunty cadence, thus turning him into a kind of jungle Mafioso.

The lure of Kipling’s primal fantasy is understandably strong, which is why it has been adapted so many times to the big screen. The Jungle Book first made the leap from page to screen in 1942, when director Zoltán Korda helmed a true live-action version produced by his brother Alexander. The same year Disney released its first animated film, Soviet filmmakers began producing a series of animated short films based on Kipling’s stories that were eventually compiled in the early 1970s into a feature film. Most recently, in 1994 Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) directed another live-action version starring Jason Scott Lee and a cast of actual animals, none of whom spoke. Favreau’s computer-generated animals are plenty talkative, and even when you know they are the product of 1’s and 0’s inside a computer mainframe, they still have a sense of life and vitality that is unmistakable and, as it turns out, crucial to the film’s effectiveness. The Jungle Book is certainly the biggest, most visually complex version of the story to reach the screen, but that sense of size is balanced by the clear focus on the characters and their relationships. And, in a world of increasing diversity and complexity, who wouldn’t get behind a story that trumps the divide between the human and the animal?

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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