Notes on “The Jungle Book”

I can’t let go of this film. When I hear Baloo I cannot stay calm. It’s my personal “Cut ‘n Shave”. But in
order to delve deeper, not just gush about the design\music\animation but discuss what I think makes
this film a classic, I’ll share with you some readings of this film:

1. I don’t like “journey films” and “The Jungle Book” is seemingly a straightforward journey film:
Bagheera declared he is taking Mowgli from point A to point B and the film indeed begins and
ends the way he described it. But the path isn’t linear. It also does not relate to the move from
place to place, but rather from character to character. Moreover, the characters return at
different points of the timeline, which reassert the feeling that this is not a geographical journey
but a theoretical one.
2. Bagheera and Baloo are father-figure archetypes. Bagheera is the over-protective father, the
one without whose supervision and support the child “won’t survive in the jungle”. Baloo, on
the other hand, believes in natural education. According to him, the jungle is just the place to
raise children as it provides all their needs.
Some of you will probably mock me for only understanding this recently, but you might be
surprised yourselves. In Baloo’s song “The Bare Necessities” (with that great wordplay that
doesn’t work in other languages) we see Baloo explaining to Mowgli that the jungle has
everything he needs in order to live. But what do we actually see? During this fairly short song
Mowgli gets pricked, buried under a bunch of bananas, hit by a coconut, almost crushed by a
rock and nearly drowned. As the “grand finale” he is kidnapped, too. Meaning, while Baloo sings
about how easy it is to survive in the jungle the film shows us how wrong he is, every single
moment (I know it sounds trivial).
Overall, most of the characters in the book, who shape Mowgli along his journey, are male.
What hints even more strongly at the jungle as a masculine place, where the dominant values
are survival, violence, militarism, power and control, friendship, paternity, sacrifice and
education. The female characters are Winifred, who undermines her husband’s hegemony (the
elephant who wears the trousers in the house), the doe who’s almost devoured and, of course,
the girl who seduces Mowgli into the human cultural world, into sexual and social maturing.
Kaa and Shere Khan can also be seen as fatherly figures, or rather anti-fatherly. Kaa is an
accepting figure. He wraps around Mowgli, and like the snake in “The Little Price” he promises
Mowgli that with his aid he will be able to stay in the jungle forever.
Shere Khan, on the other hand, like Captain Hook, sees in Mowgli’s presence in the jungle
defiance against his old age and vulnerability to humans. The option he offer Mowgli, death, is a
sort of eternal youth and never having to grow up. He exploits the aspect of the human death
wish, and the balance of power between them should be seen as the basis for “Life of Pie” on
which I will expand sometime else. King Louie is also a father in his own way, surrounded by
male monkeys, the king of a banana republic in a ruined temple, and he is willing to adopt
Mowgli in order to raise his imaginary status in his own eyes. No wonder Baloo managed to trick
 him when he dressed up as a female monkey. It seems he hadn’t seen a real female monkey for
quite a while.
3. The characters! There’s no “storyline” in this film. Disney wanted characters, and they’re the
ones driving this film. Disney bought the rights for the book because he liked the general story
and atmosphere. In fact, he wanted to use the book to create an independent work, and that’s
what he did. He died during the work on the film and did not see it completed.
The principle that claims the story is only secondary to the characters is one of the things I
consider the “material truth” of animation. True, animation isn’t a genre - we’ve already
discussed that quite a lot - but there is something that’s true about animation films. There’s
almost no “tones” in live films. There’s no such thing as a character whose existence exceeds the
film in which it appears. In “The Jungle Book” each character is a world all on its own. And it
exists outside the jungle, out of its context. Each character is autonomous.
Another wonderful thing about the characters is how animal-like they are, even when they’re
humanized.
Appendix: Article about “Don’t sacrifice a character on the story altar”.
4. The journey. Is there logic in Mowgli’s journey? Is it not just another collection of characters
with good music? I believe the journey must be examined with the cultural prism. What,
according to the film, differentiates humans from animals.
The first thing is human’s weakness and his inability to survive, which forces him to outsmart the
animals and invent tools as means for survival. No! The first thing is the red loincloth Mowgli
wears. A cloth that symbolizes the human embarrassment of exposing our privates, which refers
to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. That same expulsion that this film also deals with,
and the same claim: “the woman seduced me”.
The third issue, which also exists in the book, though differently, is the disobedience. The
jungle’s order is disrupted by the human, which made him superior. He is “above the law” of the
jungle.
The fourth issue is fire.
As in “Lord of the Flies”, which deals with the human who survives in nature far from human
civilization, here too the fire is a symbol. Shere Khan wants to kill Mowgli before he discovers
fire. The king of the apes wants Mowgli to be his own Prometheus and reveal the secret of fire,
because it will allow him to be like man in that aspect. There’s also a reference to the Tree of
Knowledge. According to the Bible, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge would make
humans “like God, knowing good and evil.” Meaning, by eating the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge man rises to the level of Creator, and thus the secret of fire is the closing of that
fundamental-existential gap between man and animal.
Mowgli isn’t interested in the fire and its power, but at the climax he experiences a revelation of
the burning bush (total deus ex machina: lighting hitting a tree) and thus in fact loses his
virginity. At the moment of truth he uses fire, which represents his superiority and his
foreignness in the animal world, in order to save Baloo. Baloo sacrificed himself, and by doing so
he drew out the human animal in Mowgli. From here, the way to the civilized world is now
short. From the moment that Mowgli holds the blazing torch he can no longer go back, and he is
doomed to be taken to the humans on the other side of the fence.
5. The last point is betrayal. Mowgli is betrayed time and time again throughout the film: his
mother abandons him, Bagheera who promises never to leave him deserts him, Baloo breaks
him promise to let him stay in the jungle, Kaa seduces him in order to devour him and King Louie
abuses him. The vultures also abandon him when he is in life-threatening danger. The jungle,
which Mowgli wants to belong to, keeps turning its back on him.
Betrayal and loneliness are central emotions in this “very happy” film. Mowgli, who seeks
protective figures, finds himself wandering alone in the jungle, helpless and lacking basic survival
skills. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden has already occurred, it’s fate, it’s a curse.
Civilization is the escape from the alienation of the natural world. The family life and love that
he did not get in the tough male world he came from can be realized in a world where there is a
woman, a civilized world, a world in which man has an advantage over animal.

Appendices:
Film art and design
Covers of film soundtrack