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Description
Lets continue our Disney marathon with the final animated film Walt made before his tragic death.

Mowgli, a young orphan boy, is found in a basket in the deep jungles of India by Bagheera, a black panther who promptly takes him to Raksha, a mother wolf who has just had cubs. She and her mate, Rama, raise him along with their own cubs and after ten years, Mowgli becomes well acquainted with jungle life and plays with his wolf siblings. Bagheera is pleased with how happy Mowgli is now, but also worries that Mowgli must eventually return to his own kind. One night, the wolf pack parents meet at Council Rock, having learned that Shere Khan, a man-eating Bengal tiger, has returned to the pack's part of the jungle. Pack leader Akela decides that Mowgli must leave the jungle for his own safety. Bagheera volunteers to escort him to a "Man-Village." They leave that very night, but Mowgli is determined to stay in the jungle. He and Bagheera rest in a tree for the night, where Kaa, a hungry Indian python, tries to devour Mowgli, but Bagheera intervenes. The next morning, Mowgli tries to join the elephant patrol, led by Colonel Hathi and his wife Winifred. Bagheera finds Mowgli, but after a fight, decides to leave Mowgli on his own. Mowgli soon meets up with the laid-back, fun-loving sloth bear Baloo, who promises to raise Mowgli himself and never take him to the Man-Village. Shortly afterward, a group of monkeys kidnap Mowgli and take him to their leader, King Louie the orangutan. King Louie offers to help Mowgli stay in the jungle if he will tell Louie how to make fire, like other humans. However, since he was not raised by humans, Mowgli does not know how to make fire. Bagheera and Baloo arrive to rescue Mowgli and in the ensuing chaos, King Louie's palace is demolished to rubble. Bagheera speaks to Baloo that night and convinces him that the jungle will never be safe for Mowgli with Shere Khan around. In the morning, Baloo reluctantly explains to Mowgli that the Man-Village is best for him, but Mowgli accuses him of breaking his promise and runs away. As Baloo sets off in search of Mowgli, Bagheera rallies the help of Hathi and his patrol. However, Shere Khan himself, who was eavesdropping on Bagheera and Hathi's conversation, is now determined to hunt and kill Mowgli himself.

Pros:
1. Mowgli is a decent protagonist.
2. Baloo and Bagheera are both amazing support.
3. Louie, Hathi, Junior, Flaps, Buzzle, Dizzy, Ziggy, Raksha, Rama, and Akela are all highly memorable side and minor characters.
4. Shere Khan is an awesome and threatening villain, and Kaa is a pretty decent side villain.
5. The comedy is very on point.
6. There are a good amount of suspenseful and intense moments.
7. Stellar vocal performances.
8. Highly entertaining and memorable music with a great score, and very well written songs like "Trust in Me", "Hathi's March", "I Wan'na Be Like You", "That's What Friends Are For", "My Own Home", and the classic "The Bare Necessities".
9. The animation is very well done and colorful, with great character designs, and well crafted backgrounds.
10. The storyline is pretty well written.

Cons:
1. The dreaded reused animation that was common for Disney in the 60s and 70s in some scenes.
2. While inspired by Kipling's book, the film is generally unfaithful to it.

Overall:
Although it's not the most faithful adaptation of Kipling's book, this is still a highly enjoyable movie.

Also one more thing: What is with DeviantArt's obsession with Kaa?

Rating:
8.5/10 (Great to Amazing)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. After The Sword in the Stone was released, storyman Bill Peet claimed to Walt Disney that "we [the animation department] can do more interesting animal characters" and suggested that Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book could be used for the studio's next film. Disney agreed and Peet created an original treatment, with little supervision, as he had done with One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. However, after the disappointing reaction to The Sword in the Stone, Walt Disney decided to become more involved in the story than he had been with the past two films, with his nephew Roy E. Disney saying that "[he] certainly influenced everything about it. (...) With Jungle Book, he obviously got hooked on the jungle and the characters that lived there".
2. Peet decided to follow closely the dramatic, dark, and sinister tone of Kipling's book, which is about the struggles between animals and man. However, the film's writers decided to make the story more straightforward, as the novel is very episodic, with Mowgli going back and forth from the jungle to the Man-Village, and Peet felt that Mowgli returning to the Man-Village should be the ending for the film. Following suggestions, Peet also created the character of Louie, king of the monkeys. Louie was a less comical character, enslaving Mowgli trying to get the boy to teach him to make fire. The orangutan would also show a plot point borrowed from The Second Jungle Book, gold and jewels under his ruins. The ending also was very different from the final film's: after Mowgli got to the man village, he would get into an argument with Buldeo the hunter which would cause him to return to the jungle with a torch, which he would use to scare those who attacked or mocked him through the journey, before being dragged back to the ruins by Buldeo in search for the treasure. After recovering a great part of the treasure, Buldeo would declare his intentions to burn the jungle to avoid the threat of Shere Khan, only for the tiger to attack and kill him, before being killed by Mowgli with the hunter's gun. Due to his actions, Mowgli would be hailed as a hero in both the jungle and the village, and declared the first human to be part of the wolves' council. Disney was not pleased with how the story was turning out, as he felt it was too dark for family viewing and insisted on script changes. Peet refused, and after a long argument, Peet left the Disney studio in January 1964.
3. Disney then assigned Larry Clemmons as his new writer and one of the four story men for the film, giving Clemmons a copy of Kipling's book, and telling him: "The first thing I want you to do is not to read it". Clemmons still looked at the novel and thought it was too disjointed and without continuity, needing adaptations to fit a film script. Clemmons wanted to start in medias res, with some flashbacks afterward, but then Disney said to focus on doing the storyline more straight: "Let's do the meat of the picture. Let's establish the characters. Let's have fun with it". Although much of Bill Peet's work was discarded, the personalities of the characters remained in the final film. This was because Disney felt that the story should be kept simple, and the characters should drive the story. Disney took an active role in the story meetings, acting out each role and helping to explore the emotions of the characters, help create gags and develop emotional sequences. Clemmons also created the human girl for which Mowgli falls in love, as the animators considered that falling in love would be the best excuse for Mowgli to leave the jungle. Clemmons would write a rough script with an outline for most sequences. The story artists then discussed how to fill the scenes, including the comedic gags to employ. The script also tried to incorporate how the voice actors molded their characters and interacted with each other. The Jungle Book also marks the last animated film from the company to have Disney's personal touches, before his death on December 15, 1966.
4. David Bailey was originally cast as Mowgli, but his voice changed during production, leading Bailey to not fit the "young innocence of Mowgli's character" at which the producers were aiming. Thus director Wolfgang Reitherman cast his son Bruce, who had just voiced Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. The animators shot footage of Bruce as a guide for the character's performance.
5. In the original book, the vultures are grim and evil characters who feast on the dead. Disney lightened it up by having the vultures bearing a physical and vocal resemblance to The Beatles, including the signature mop-top haircut. It was also planned to have the members of the band to both voice the characters and sing their song, "That's What Friends Are For". However, at the time, The Beatles' John Lennon refused to work on animated films which led to the idea being discarded. The casting of the vultures still brought a British Invasion musician, Chad Stuart of the duo Chad & Jeremy. In earlier drafts of the scene the vultures had a near-sighted rhinoceros friend named Rocky, who was to be voiced by Frank Fontaine. However, Walt decided to cut the character for feeling that the film had already much action with the monkeys and vultures.
6. Animation on The Jungle Book commenced on May 2, 1966. While many of the later Disney feature films had animators being responsible for single characters, in The Jungle Book the animators were in charge of whole sequences, since many have characters interacting with one another. The animation was done by xerography, with character design, led by Ken Anderson, employing rough, artistic edges in contrast to the round animals seen in productions such as Dumbo. Anderson also decided to make Shere Khan resemble his voice actor, George Sanders. Backgrounds were hand-painted — with exception of the waterfall, mostly consisting of footage of the Angel Falls - and sometimes scenery was used in both foreground and bottom to create a notion of depth. Following one of Reitherman's trademarks of reusing animation of his previous films, the wolf cubs are based on dogs from 101 Dalmatians. Animator Milt Kahl based Bagheera and Shere Khan's movements on live-action felines, which he saw in two Disney productions, A Tiger Walks and the "Jungle Cat" episode of True-Life Adventures. Baloo was also based on footage of bears, even incorporating the animal's penchant for scratching. Since Kaa has no limbs, his design received big expressive eyes, and parts of Kaa's body did the action that normally would be done with hands. The monkeys' dance during "I Wan'na Be Like You" was partially inspired by a performance Louis Prima did with his band at Disney's soundstage to convince Walt Disney to cast him.
7. Longtime Disney collaborator Terry Gilkyson was the first songwriter to bring several complete songs that followed the book closely but Walt Disney felt that his efforts were too dark. The only piece of Gilkyson's work which survived to the final film was his upbeat tune "The Bare Necessities", which was liked by the rest of the film crew. The Sherman Brothers were then brought in to do a complete rewrite. Disney asked the siblings if they had read Kipling's book and they replied that they had done so "a long, long time ago" and that they had also seen the 1942 version by Alexander Korda. Disney said the "nice, mysterious, heavy stuff" from both works was not what he aimed for, instead going for a "lightness, a Disney touch". Disney frequently brought the composers to the storyline sessions. He asked them to "find scary places and write fun songs" for their compositions that fit in with the story and advanced the plot instead of being interruptive.
8. Some bookings of the film were in a double feature format with Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar.
9. The Jungle Book was re-released theatrically in North America three times, 1978, 1984, and 1990.
10. The Jungle Book was released in the United States on VHS in 1991 as part of the Walt Disney Classics product line. It was reissued on video in 1997 as part of the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection for the film's 30th anniversary. A Limited Issue DVD was released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment in 1999. The film was released once again as a 2-disc Platinum Edition DVD in 2007 to commemorate its 40th anniversary. The film was released in a Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy Combo pack in 2014 as part of Disney's Diamond Edition line.
11. The film spawned two TV series. Talespin, which features Baloo as the primary character, and occasional appearances from Louie and Shere Khan that ran from 1990 to 1991, and Jungle Cubs, which focuses on the animal characters in their youth that ran from 1996 to 1998.
12. The film also spawned three live action remakes. The first one in 1994 titled Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy), the second remake, albeit very loose, in 1998 titles The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story which was released straight to video, and the third remake in 2016 from Iron Man director Jon Favreau. The 2016 remake currently has a sequel in development.
13. The original animated film received a sequel titled The Jungle Book 2, which was released to theaters in 2003. Another sequel titled The Jungle Book 3 was planned, but eventually scrapped.
14. There are two video games based on the film: One was a platformer released in 1993 for the NES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Game Gear, Super Nintendo, Game Boy and PC. A second adaptation for the Game Boy Advance was later released in 2003. The Jungle Book Groove Party was a dance mat game released in 2000 for PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Kaa and Shere Khan have also made cameo appearances in another Disney video game, Quackshot. A world based on the film was intended to appear more than once in the Square Enix-Disney Kingdom Hearts video game series, but was omitted both times, first in the first game because it featured a similar world based on Tarzan, and second in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, although areas of the world are accessible via hacking codes.

Description
Lets continue our Disney marathon with the final animated film Walt made before his tragic death.

Mowgli, a young orphan boy, is found in a basket in the deep jungles of India by Bagheera, a black panther who promptly takes him to Raksha, a mother wolf who has just had cubs. She and her mate, Rama, raise him along with their own cubs and after ten years, Mowgli becomes well acquainted with jungle life and plays with his wolf siblings. Bagheera is pleased with how happy Mowgli is now, but also worries that Mowgli must eventually return to his own kind. One night, the wolf pack parents meet at Council Rock, having learned that Shere Khan, a man-eating Bengal tiger, has returned to the pack's part of the jungle. Pack leader Akela decides that Mowgli must leave the jungle for his own safety. Bagheera volunteers to escort him to a "Man-Village." They leave that very night, but Mowgli is determined to stay in the jungle. He and Bagheera rest in a tree for the night, where Kaa, a hungry Indian python, tries to devour Mowgli, but Bagheera intervenes. The next morning, Mowgli tries to join the elephant patrol, led by Colonel Hathi and his wife Winifred. Bagheera finds Mowgli, but after a fight, decides to leave Mowgli on his own. Mowgli soon meets up with the laid-back, fun-loving sloth bear Baloo, who promises to raise Mowgli himself and never take him to the Man-Village. Shortly afterward, a group of monkeys kidnap Mowgli and take him to their leader, King Louie the orangutan. King Louie offers to help Mowgli stay in the jungle if he will tell Louie how to make fire, like other humans. However, since he was not raised by humans, Mowgli does not know how to make fire. Bagheera and Baloo arrive to rescue Mowgli and in the ensuing chaos, King Louie's palace is demolished to rubble. Bagheera speaks to Baloo that night and convinces him that the jungle will never be safe for Mowgli with Shere Khan around. In the morning, Baloo reluctantly explains to Mowgli that the Man-Village is best for him, but Mowgli accuses him of breaking his promise and runs away. As Baloo sets off in search of Mowgli, Bagheera rallies the help of Hathi and his patrol. However, Shere Khan himself, who was eavesdropping on Bagheera and Hathi's conversation, is now determined to hunt and kill Mowgli himself.

Pros:
1. Mowgli is a decent protagonist.
2. Baloo and Bagheera are both amazing support.
3. Louie, Hathi, Junior, Flaps, Buzzle, Dizzy, Ziggy, Raksha, Rama, and Akela are all highly memorable side and minor characters.
4. Shere Khan is an awesome and threatening villain, and Kaa is a pretty decent side villain.
5. The comedy is very on point.
6. There are a good amount of suspenseful and intense moments.
7. Stellar vocal performances.
8. Highly entertaining and memorable music with a great score, and very well written songs like "Trust in Me", "Hathi's March", "I Wan'na Be Like You", "That's What Friends Are For", "My Own Home", and the classic "The Bare Necessities".
9. The animation is very well done and colorful, with great character designs, and well crafted backgrounds.
10. The storyline is pretty well written.

Cons:
1. The dreaded reused animation that was common for Disney in the 60s and 70s in some scenes.
2. While inspired by Kipling's book, the film is generally unfaithful to it.

Overall:
Although it's not the most faithful adaptation of Kipling's book, this is still a highly enjoyable movie.

Also one more thing: What is with DeviantArt's obsession with Kaa?

Rating:
8.5/10 (Great to Amazing)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. After The Sword in the Stone was released, storyman Bill Peet claimed to Walt Disney that "we [the animation department] can do more interesting animal characters" and suggested that Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book could be used for the studio's next film. Disney agreed and Peet created an original treatment, with little supervision, as he had done with One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. However, after the disappointing reaction to The Sword in the Stone, Walt Disney decided to become more involved in the story than he had been with the past two films, with his nephew Roy E. Disney saying that "[he] certainly influenced everything about it. (...) With Jungle Book, he obviously got hooked on the jungle and the characters that lived there".
2. Peet decided to follow closely the dramatic, dark, and sinister tone of Kipling's book, which is about the struggles between animals and man. However, the film's writers decided to make the story more straightforward, as the novel is very episodic, with Mowgli going back and forth from the jungle to the Man-Village, and Peet felt that Mowgli returning to the Man-Village should be the ending for the film. Following suggestions, Peet also created the character of Louie, king of the monkeys. Louie was a less comical character, enslaving Mowgli trying to get the boy to teach him to make fire. The orangutan would also show a plot point borrowed from The Second Jungle Book, gold and jewels under his ruins. The ending also was very different from the final film's: after Mowgli got to the man village, he would get into an argument with Buldeo the hunter which would cause him to return to the jungle with a torch, which he would use to scare those who attacked or mocked him through the journey, before being dragged back to the ruins by Buldeo in search for the treasure. After recovering a great part of the treasure, Buldeo would declare his intentions to burn the jungle to avoid the threat of Shere Khan, only for the tiger to attack and kill him, before being killed by Mowgli with the hunter's gun. Due to his actions, Mowgli would be hailed as a hero in both the jungle and the village, and declared the first human to be part of the wolves' council. Disney was not pleased with how the story was turning out, as he felt it was too dark for family viewing and insisted on script changes. Peet refused, and after a long argument, Peet left the Disney studio in January 1964.
3. Disney then assigned Larry Clemmons as his new writer and one of the four story men for the film, giving Clemmons a copy of Kipling's book, and telling him: "The first thing I want you to do is not to read it". Clemmons still looked at the novel and thought it was too disjointed and without continuity, needing adaptations to fit a film script. Clemmons wanted to start in medias res, with some flashbacks afterward, but then Disney said to focus on doing the storyline more straight: "Let's do the meat of the picture. Let's establish the characters. Let's have fun with it". Although much of Bill Peet's work was discarded, the personalities of the characters remained in the final film. This was because Disney felt that the story should be kept simple, and the characters should drive the story. Disney took an active role in the story meetings, acting out each role and helping to explore the emotions of the characters, help create gags and develop emotional sequences. Clemmons also created the human girl for which Mowgli falls in love, as the animators considered that falling in love would be the best excuse for Mowgli to leave the jungle. Clemmons would write a rough script with an outline for most sequences. The story artists then discussed how to fill the scenes, including the comedic gags to employ. The script also tried to incorporate how the voice actors molded their characters and interacted with each other. The Jungle Book also marks the last animated film from the company to have Disney's personal touches, before his death on December 15, 1966.
4. David Bailey was originally cast as Mowgli, but his voice changed during production, leading Bailey to not fit the "young innocence of Mowgli's character" at which the producers were aiming. Thus director Wolfgang Reitherman cast his son Bruce, who had just voiced Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. The animators shot footage of Bruce as a guide for the character's performance.
5. In the original book, the vultures are grim and evil characters who feast on the dead. Disney lightened it up by having the vultures bearing a physical and vocal resemblance to The Beatles, including the signature mop-top haircut. It was also planned to have the members of the band to both voice the characters and sing their song, "That's What Friends Are For". However, at the time, The Beatles' John Lennon refused to work on animated films which led to the idea being discarded. The casting of the vultures still brought a British Invasion musician, Chad Stuart of the duo Chad & Jeremy. In earlier drafts of the scene the vultures had a near-sighted rhinoceros friend named Rocky, who was to be voiced by Frank Fontaine. However, Walt decided to cut the character for feeling that the film had already much action with the monkeys and vultures.
6. Animation on The Jungle Book commenced on May 2, 1966. While many of the later Disney feature films had animators being responsible for single characters, in The Jungle Book the animators were in charge of whole sequences, since many have characters interacting with one another. The animation was done by xerography, with character design, led by Ken Anderson, employing rough, artistic edges in contrast to the round animals seen in productions such as Dumbo. Anderson also decided to make Shere Khan resemble his voice actor, George Sanders. Backgrounds were hand-painted — with exception of the waterfall, mostly consisting of footage of the Angel Falls - and sometimes scenery was used in both foreground and bottom to create a notion of depth. Following one of Reitherman's trademarks of reusing animation of his previous films, the wolf cubs are based on dogs from 101 Dalmatians. Animator Milt Kahl based Bagheera and Shere Khan's movements on live-action felines, which he saw in two Disney productions, A Tiger Walks and the "Jungle Cat" episode of True-Life Adventures. Baloo was also based on footage of bears, even incorporating the animal's penchant for scratching. Since Kaa has no limbs, his design received big expressive eyes, and parts of Kaa's body did the action that normally would be done with hands. The monkeys' dance during "I Wan'na Be Like You" was partially inspired by a performance Louis Prima did with his band at Disney's soundstage to convince Walt Disney to cast him.
7. Longtime Disney collaborator Terry Gilkyson was the first songwriter to bring several complete songs that followed the book closely but Walt Disney felt that his efforts were too dark. The only piece of Gilkyson's work which survived to the final film was his upbeat tune "The Bare Necessities", which was liked by the rest of the film crew. The Sherman Brothers were then brought in to do a complete rewrite. Disney asked the siblings if they had read Kipling's book and they replied that they had done so "a long, long time ago" and that they had also seen the 1942 version by Alexander Korda. Disney said the "nice, mysterious, heavy stuff" from both works was not what he aimed for, instead going for a "lightness, a Disney touch". Disney frequently brought the composers to the storyline sessions. He asked them to "find scary places and write fun songs" for their compositions that fit in with the story and advanced the plot instead of being interruptive.
8. Some bookings of the film were in a double feature format with Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar.
9. The Jungle Book was re-released theatrically in North America three times, 1978, 1984, and 1990.
10. The Jungle Book was released in the United States on VHS in 1991 as part of the Walt Disney Classics product line. It was reissued on video in 1997 as part of the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection for the film's 30th anniversary. A Limited Issue DVD was released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment in 1999. The film was released once again as a 2-disc Platinum Edition DVD in 2007 to commemorate its 40th anniversary. The film was released in a Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy Combo pack in 2014 as part of Disney's Diamond Edition line.
11. The film spawned two TV series. Talespin, which features Baloo as the primary character, and occasional appearances from Louie and Shere Khan that ran from 1990 to 1991, and Jungle Cubs, which focuses on the animal characters in their youth that ran from 1996 to 1998.
12. The film also spawned three live action remakes. The first one in 1994 titled Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy), the second remake, albeit very loose, in 1998 titles The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story which was released straight to video, and the third remake in 2016 from Iron Man director Jon Favreau. The 2016 remake currently has a sequel in development.
13. The original animated film received a sequel titled The Jungle Book 2, which was released to theaters in 2003. Another sequel titled The Jungle Book 3 was planned, but eventually scrapped.
14. There are two video games based on the film: One was a platformer released in 1993 for the NES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Game Gear, Super Nintendo, Game Boy and PC. A second adaptation for the Game Boy Advance was later released in 2003. The Jungle Book Groove Party was a dance mat game released in 2000 for PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Kaa and Shere Khan have also made cameo appearances in another Disney video game, Quackshot. A world based on the film was intended to appear more than once in the Square Enix-Disney Kingdom Hearts video game series, but was omitted both times, first in the first game because it featured a similar world based on Tarzan, and second in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, although areas of the world are accessible via hacking codes.