10 Reasons The Jungle Book Is Disneys Best LiveAction Remake

10 Reasons The Jungle Book Is Disney’s Best Live-Action Remake

Disney has made more than a few live action remakes at this point, but The Jungle Book still stands out as its best one for these reasons.

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Disney is a powerhouse in the current moviegoing landscape, slowly dominating every major blockbuster release. Before too long, all the top 10 movies of a given year will be released by Disney. In addition to pumping out Star Wars movies, Marvel movies, and Pixar movies, the Mouse House has been churning out live-action remakes of all its old animated classics.

Since the studio’s remakes of Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King have all grossed over $1 billion, Disney won’t stop remaking its beloved cartoons any time soon. Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book was the first in the recent string of live-action remakes and remains the best of the bunch.

10 The Original Movie Was Imperfect

The original animated Jungle Book from the ‘60s is a timeless classic that can be enjoyed by today’s audiences as much as it was enjoyed by contemporary moviegoers, but it’s not quite a perfect movie. Its plotting is pretty loose and it has a handful of unmemorable scenes.

Unlike The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, which were already perfect in animated form, The Jungle Book had some room for improvement when Jon Favreau was tapped to remake it.

9 It’s Not Just A Shot-For-Shot Remake

The worst live-action Disney remakes are just shot-for-shot updates of the original. Jon Favreau’s next remake for the studio, The Lion King, simply recreating all the iconic moments from the 1994 masterpiece in live-action, which feels as redundant as Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake.

But Favreau’s first Disney remake, The Jungle Book, didn’t just replicate the original. It has its own visual style and, for the most part, its own story.

8 Neel Sethi Is A Compelling Lead As Mowgli

The producers of The Jungle Book auditioned thousands of kids for the role of Mowgli in the U.S., the UK, Canada, and New Zealand and eventually settled on young Neel Sethi, who proved to be the perfect choice for the part.

His performance as Mowgli has the kind of pathos and heart one might expect from an adult actor, which is especially impressive because a lot of the stuff around him was added in post-production, so he had nothing but bluescreens to react to, making it even more of a challenge than starring in a movie would usually be for a child actor (which is already pretty challenging).

7 The Photorealistic Animation Is Genuinely Impressive

While the nature documentary look of The Lion King was much blander and less interesting than the vibrant animation of the original movie, the photorealistic animation in The Jungle Book is genuinely impressive.

The visuals bring the jungle environments to life, deftly blending real photography with state-of-the-art computer-generated effects.

6 The Voice Roles Are Perfectly Cast With A-Listers

Ever since the success of The Jungle Book, all of Disney’s remakes have been filled with A-list stars, from Will Smith in Aladdin to Beyoncé in The Lion King, because having a star-studded cast sure worked out for Favreau’s trend-setting live-action update of an animated classic. The only dead weight in the Jungle Book cast is Christopher Walken, who can’t sing very well, yet managed to negotiate his way to a solo number.

From major roles like Ben Kingsley as Bagheera and Idris Elba as the villainous Shere Khan to minor ones like Lupita Nyong’o as Raksha and Scarlett Johansson as Kaa, every non-King Louie role in The Jungle Book is well-cast – especially Bill Murray, whose bumbling comic charms were ideal for the role of Baloo.

5 Justin Marks’ Script Tightened Up The Original Story

The original animated Jungle Book doesn’t have a complete plot. Instead, it’s more of a string of loosely connected vignettes drawn from Rudyard Kipling’s story collection of the same name.

Justin Marks’ script for the live-action remake gave the narrative a clearer throughline and added some connections between previously unrelated subplots to tighten up the story and make it more of a unified piece. Jon Favreau’s Jungle Book remake is, so far, the only live-action Disney remake to improve on the original (and probably always will be).

4 It Has Just The Right Amount Of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is the most common form of currency in these live-action remakes. It’s the whole reason for their success. So many people bought tickets to see the Beauty and the Beast remake because they remember watching Beauty and the Beast over and over again as children.

But a movie predicated on nostalgia is going to feel empty and insubstantial, as most of these Disney remakes have. The Jungle Book has just the right amount of nostalgia; it has enough fan service to please the original’s admirers, but enough new material to feel like its own entity.

3 John Debney’s Score Gives The Movie A Musical Identity Of Its Own

Although it retains all the most memorable musical numbers from the original, the live-action remake of The Jungle Book is far from the full-on musical that its predecessor is.

While the new versions of the musical numbers, which are sung by actors who aren’t professional singers, pale in comparison to the original’s musical numbers, which were sung by professional voice artists, John Debney’s score gives the remake a musical identity of its own.

2 Idris Elba’s Shere Khan Is A Terrifying Villain

The way that Idris Elba plays Shere Khan is terrifying. His stranglehold on the jungle is palpable in the other animals’ fear and in his menacing prowling across the plains. Elba’s performance is more like Jeremy Irons’ sinister take on The Lion King’s Scar than George Sanders’ original Shere Khan, but it works wonders and the result is an unforgettable baddie.

By comparison, the villains in the other live-action Disney remakes – Luke Evans’ Gaston, Michael Keaton’s V. A. Vandevere, even Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Scar – have been almost entirely forgettable, failing to hold a candle to their animated predecessors.

1 It Holds Up If You Haven’t Seen The Original

Most of Disney’s live-action remakes rely on the audience’s familiarity with the original to work. The remakes of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, for example, are chock full of fan service that would be lost on newcomers and panders to fans of a version of the movie that already exists.

The remake of The Jungle Book is one of the only ones that holds up and makes sense to viewers who haven’t seen the original. The point of remakes is to find a new audience with an old story, not wink at fans of the first one.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/disney-best-live-action-remake-jungle-book/

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