And John Grant said "...the story seems to exist solely for the purpose of linking the song-and-dance items," in his Encyclopedia Of Walt Disney's Animated Characters.
I suppose these charges and possibly more can be supported, but I've never cared. I hold the movie to be one of Disney's finest. Which is why I'm quite dizzy with anticipation after learning of the shortly forthcoming Two-Disc "40th Anniversary Platinum Edition."
Quoting directly from Amazon.com:
This Platinum Edition includes everything from the standard bonus features like...deleted songs to exciting and sometimes rare commentaries by everyone from modern day animators to Walt Disney himself, multiple featurettes about specific aspects of the film and its production, and a lengthy deleted scene featuring lost character Rocky the Rhino. Especially interesting for adults and Disney fans are "The Bare Necessities: The making of The Jungle Book" featurette, which explores Walt Disney's commitment to developing strong characters and his insistence that writers, animators, and song writers create a light version of Jungle Book that followed his own personal interpretation of the story, and the "The Lure of The Jungle Book" featurette, which discusses Frank Thomas' and Ollie Johnston's amazing contribution to the film as prolific animators and the inspiration and influence that their work provided for future animators including Brad Bird (The Incredibles), Andreas Deja (Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King)...and Eric Goldberg (Fantasia 2000). The full length commentary by Bruce Reitherman (voice of Mowgli), animator Andreas Deja, and composer Richard Sherman with its interspersed archival commentary of Disney greats from the original creative team (Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, and others is also very interesting and insightful.
God, I love DVDs.
3 comments:
Great! I loved that film as a kid.
Jungle Book was the second animated Disney flick I saw in a theatre, and certainly the first one that made a strong impression on me. I liked it so much when it hit the local drive-in a few weeks later, I talked my parents into taking me to see it again!
True, it's slight in a lot of ways, but I think it has a lot of heart and the voice talent was very well chosen. Maltin doesn't know shit sometimes.
Well, in his defense, his criticism was that at the time of release it was distracting to hear, for example, the voice of Phil Harris coming out of Baloo the bear.
Harris was still a pretty-big star then, well-remembered from The Jack Benny Program and his own show, especially by adults.
In The Jungle Book, by their own admission, Disney let the voices dictate the animation, rather than the other way around, and that's what Maltin and some other Disney historians object to. Baloo is definitely "Phil Harris as Baloo."
But this is not as much of a problem for younger generations, who discover his older work, if at all, usually *after* coming to love him as Baloo.
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