Review: Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book Gets Platinum Edition DVD

Fantasmoland for the rugrat set. It deserves to be rescued from the garbage heap where most other Disney movies ought to be dumped.

The Jungle BookWalt Disney was overseeing Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book to its 1967 release when he died. Given his cinematic legacy of providing sexless yet fiercely heteronormative parables to multiple generations of mousey parents (some of whom, by this point, had been raised by his earlier primers), it’s not surprising that he lost the will to live after allowing his animators to breathe in the hot air of Jungle fever. One could easily picture him dropping by to view some of the rushes and being shown the scene where the loose-limbed 10-year-old nudist boy Mowgli first meets Baloo, the biggest gay, err, I mean gray bear in the jungle. When Bagheera the panther informs Mowgli’s new partner in tickling and riding bearback that he intends to take the orphan boy who was raised by wolves back to “Man Village,” and when Baloo responds, “Man Village? They’ll ruin him. They’ll turn him into a man,” you can still faintly hear the old studio mogul’s soul recoiling. And when one considers that Cub Scout pack leaders go by the names of characters in the film, you can sense his erection shriveling from beyond the grave.

Director Wolfgang Reitherman (one of the trio who brought Disney into the era of camp with 101 Dalmations’ Cruella De Vil) and his team of freewheeling animators took a great deal of license with Kipling’s pint-sized morality tales in order to strip the Disney ethos down to its “Bare Necessities,” meaning to cut females out of the picture almost entirely, at least until Mowgli has been readily passed from one zoological clan to the next and been given plenty of time to relish the thought of remaining in the jungle for the rest of his life, doing as the bears do and inspiring slap-happy monkeys to howl “I Wan’na Be Like You.” When compared to the gym-bunny immobility of Disney’s much-later Tarzan, Reitherman’s physical, gliding depiction of Mowgli the man-cub resembles jungle jailbait (rendered all the more sick when one discovers the character was voiced by the director’s son, who himself wanted so much to remain in the jungle that his adult career has been spent as a nature photographer), which explains Baloo’s encroaching sense of guilt for ever teaching the boy the tricks of the bear trade.

The guilt grows as the processional of eager beavers, predatory pythons, and old queen tigers (voiced, appropriately, by Addison DeWitt himself, George Sanders) pounce like piranhas upon a swimming calf, and the double entendres know no bounds (even the vultures jump into the pan-species gang bang, singing, “We’ve never met an animal we didn’t like”), but you gotta give the animators credit where credit’s due: rarely has a Disney movie before or since seemed as genuinely carefree. With the exception of The Emperor’s New Groove, The Jungle Book may be Disney’s greatest Mouse House party, at least up until the moment Mowgli reaches the perimeter of the Man Village, spies on a sad little girl mournfully warbling, “I must go to fetch the water, I must go to fetch the water, I must go to fetch the water till the day that I’m grown” and immediately grabs her jugs to bear her burden. The literally last-minute stab at domestic foreplay is simply unbelievable, but Baloo’s lip-licking post-mortem—“I still think he’d a made one swell bear”—is what sticks.

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Image/Sound

There appears to be some confusion over the video transfer for the film’s 40th anniversary Platinum Edition. Previously, the film was released on DVD in an open matte 1.37:1 aspect ratio, which led many to assume that was the correct aspect ratio. (Both Wikipedia and IMDB appear to believe this to be true.) But this new version presents the film in anamorphic 1.78:1, a move which many of the technically-minded animation experts’ websites and forums (not to mention the liner notes in the DVD case) seem to agree is correct. I don’t have a negative to confirm, but I’m siding with the experts over IMDB in this case. The film’s opening credits and frequent two shots look too horizontally aligned to assume Buena Vista Home Entertainment were simply caving to the growing preponderance of 16:9 TV sets out there. Furthermore, the digital dirt-scrubbing that I’ve been ambivalent toward in previous DVDs for Cinderella and Lady in the Tramp doesn’t seem as out of control here, perhaps because the muted colors of The Jungle Book don’t retroactively seem like HD demo-bait. And, as though the movie weren’t already nutty enough, you can now watch “I Wan’na Be Like You” in French and Spanish, though I was disappointed to learn that the scatting was the same in each language.

Extras

The only extra feature I was hoping for-an interactive map showing where each of the film’s pervert animators live now, a la sex registry websites-was sadly not included. The next best thing, I guess, is a section of mirthless interactive games under the header “Jungle Fun.” They try to slip in some nominally educational bits (15 minutes of DisneyPedia infotainment and another interactive language game), but it’s mostly a bunch of stupefying first-gear material. “Man Village” contains all the sugarcoated behind-the-scenes featurettes that kids will skip and adults will ignore. Nothing much of note here other than the fact that the segment that purportedly explains “The Lure of The Jungle Book” is a big lie. All in all, there’s not a whole lot here to merit giving the film the full-out 2-disc treatment. The most comprehensive feature, the commentary track, is on the first disc anyway. In it, animator Andreas Deja, Bruce Reitherman (the voice of Mowgli), and composer Richard M. Sherman (who apparently carted a piano into the recording session) share time with archived audio clips from other departed participants. It’s only slightly more reverential than the film, which is to say it’s probably the lightest, least self-inflated track to ever appear on a Disney catalog disc. Did I say the next best thing to a map of perverts was “Jungle Fun”? I must have temporarily forgotten the obligatory music video featuring underage hotties pulling orgasm faces while they perform a contractually required cover of one of the film’s songs. This time, it’s the twink Jonas Brothers (and their young Lou Pearlman-looking bassist), who are recruited to sing the refrain “I wan’na talk like you” a few octaves higher than usual.

Overall

Fantasmoland for the rugrat set. It deserves to be rescued from the garbage heap where most other Disney movies ought to be dumped.

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Score: 
 Cast: Phil Harris, Sebastian Cabot, Louis Prima, George Sanders, Sterling Holloway, J. Pat O'Malley, Bruce Reitherman, Verna Felton, Clint Howard  Director: Wolfgang Reitherman  Screenwriter: Larry Clemmons, Ralph Wright, Ken Anderson, Vance Gerry  Distributor: Buena Vista Home Entertainment  Running Time: 78 min  Rating: G  Year: 1967  Release Date: October 2, 2007  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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