80/100

Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book, a hybrid project of Kipling's original source material and the 1967 animated film, is a delicate story but a magnificent world. Almost entirely computer-generated, it's a wondrous dreamscape of sensations and textures - 3D is essential here - which evoke all the mythical, primordial emotion. Comparisons of recent pop-culture touchstones such as Avatar and Gravity have been tossed around, but Favreau's film feels vividly minor even with the heavenly sights and sounds. It's a little movie, grounded in the broad strokes of family lost, friendships found, and the comfort of belonging but never stripped of the darkness always lurking out of frame.

It's a testament to the entire team of collaborators that the quaint…

Good luck, Andy Serkis.
I love you, but good bloody luck.

For those waiting for the release of The Jungle Book, I can assure you you're in an absolute treat. The battle for what’s the better Jungle Book adaptation has already finished before it even began, with Disney once again stepping up to the plate to show us what's what. Their version is an awesome adventure story, with some brief sparks of musical and comedy, and Jon Favreau directs the hell out of all of it. With last year's Cinderella and now this, The Jungle Book is easily Disney’s best animation to "live action” film to date.

I quote the term live action purposefully because, if you weren't already aware,…

My ten-year old daughter was watching this recently as I sat nearby struggling to put together some IKEA furniture. After the first thirty minutes, I lost track of how many times she yawned.

"Hmmm," I thought. "Shouldn't this be impressing her more?"

After it was over, I asked what she thought of the film.

- I don't know. It was fine, I guess. I think I'm just tired of talking animals.

Up on the screen, thousands of names scrolled by on the end credits and the scope of the project began to come into view.

- It sure took a lot of people to make this movie.

- I don't know, if you've got like a million people doing all…

It's a really good movie, they said...
95% on Rotten Tomatoes, they said...

Yea, OK. Good CGI doesn't make a movie good.

The Good: most of the visual effects are very impressive, some of the voice acting is very good.

The Bad: everything else... it's bad. The kid can't act to save his life, it's been a while since I've seen a performance THIS BAD, even for a child actor. And he's kind of supposed to carry this film, so there's that. The storytelling itself is very average for an adventure film, and so is the camera work. The tone is all over the place. It's all very bland, but also incredibly safe and formulaic. And as much as I…

The search for casting Mowgli was extensive, with thousands of children auditioning from the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada. Eventually, newcomer Neel Sethi was confirmed for the role, with casting director Rebecca Williams describing him as embodying "the heart, humor, and daring of the character,". 

And yet, he’s the worst child actor I have ever witnessed. The CGI animals have more life than he does. Truly dreadful work. He RUINS this film. He stumbles over lines and cannot comprehend how to act with the CGI and green screen.

Other than that? It’s a just a celebrity-filled uninspired remake. Favreau is a borderline hack and I do not understand anyone treating him like anything more than that.…

Of the Disney reimagines, I actually do not think this adaptation of The Jungle Book is that bad. This marked the first movie of these live action remakes that I heard of when it came out and that Disney was in the works remaking most of their classics now with photo-realistic CGI, and this is a huge step up in CGI quality. It does look rather impressive at times, but at other times however, it falls straight into the uncanny valley. There is just something about watching photo-realistic animals talk that just looks wrong to me and I immediately fall out of the immersion. I also feel like it is pointless to remake these movies because all of the emotions…

watched the last 20ish minutes at the dentist. could not understand 95% of the dialogue. it looked pretty. the dentist said it was a cute movie which i thought was weird because the part that was showing would have traumatized me if i had seen it when i was 6 which was how old i was when i saw the original jungle book. two things:

- there is a scene when mowgli is running through a burning forest and sees a tree and says “a tree!” which is stupid. or maybe he says “hey tree” because when he says “a tree” the “a” sounds like “ay” instead of “uh” which is how literally everyone says it. maybe i was hallucinating…