JON Favreau has laboured mightily to deliver a third filming of Rudyard Kipling’s sublime two-volume story about Mowgli, the man-child reared from infancy among a pack of wolves in India.
It’s exciting, it’s handsome. The combined skills of Jim Henson Company puppeteers and CG visualisation of Kipling’s wonderful anthropomorphic characters is equal to, perhaps superior to, the best. The narrative concept originated with the second filming in a Disney animation. And that’s where this version comes unstuck.
I’d like to know how Indian audiences received Favreau’s version when it was released there earlier this month. In fact, I wonder how Indian readers responded to the stories when they were first published. For the majority of the world’s non-Indian population, the stories provide wonderful, intelligent word-pictures of a distant sub-continent, conveying a sub-text about society, ethics, morality and emotion. Compressing all their elements into a movie may not be impossible but, by golly, it would be a daunting challenge. And despite hard work from Favreau and his team, their vision falls short of Kipling’s.
New Yorker Neel Sethi plays Mowgli with vigour and little else. The animal character’s voice dialogue is typical more of contemporary American slangy mangling of English than Kipling’s elegant prose. American accents compound that detriment. And while the film’s trivia list declares all the film’s animals to be native to India, armadillos are most definitely not.
Take the kids. They’ll enjoy the experience. Then provide them with the books. They’ll enjoy those more.
At all cinemas
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