Look for the Bare Necessities somewhere else... Review on Jungle Book 2 Movie

To see or not to see that was the question, but finally past loyalties won and I decided to go and check the latest edition of Jungle Book released by Walt Disney Pic. this summer. I had in front of me 2 choices actually when I realised that I wanted to check out a movie, one was the afore mentioned animated movie and the other was ‘The Core’, after great debate (which I so succinctly summed up in the first line of the review, hehe) I decided that ‘Jungle Book 2’ it was going to be.

For the first time in my extremely long life of 21 years I felt like I was old, the cause of this??? Well when you are oldest movie goer in the entire theatre, who doesn’t have kids, well then it makes you feel kinda outta place. Well now that I’ve covered a lot of side info I think I’ll give you an idea of what the whole experience was like. ‘The Jungle Book’ is the oldest cartoon picture that I can vividly recall seeing, the sights and sounds the old ‘Bare Necessities’ song all were extremely clear in my mind and the least I expected Disney to be able to do was not tarnish that image. I was highly disappointed, not only was there no story but the entire movie was highly predictable…. Or maybe I’m just too old to get this cartoon and it was meant for younger people then me.

The Story

Well I guess the problem, unlike in the original edition where there was a classic story to begin with, in this continuation there is absolutely no story whatsoever.

The story begins approximately a couple of months after Mowgli enters the ‘man-village’, as it is to be expected he is facing quite a few problems, though he has been adopted by a loving family he still finds himself yearning for ‘Old Baloo’ and finds the rules and restrictions laid down on him highly painful to follow. Also he’s joined by two new characters actually its one new character a little boy named ‘Ranjan’ who is his adopted brother and the other is the girl with the lovely eyes who drew our young lad into the village in the first place ‘Shanti’. On the other side old papa bear is having an even harder time coping with the loss of his ‘lil britches’ and is talking to small trees and trying to pretend that they are Mowgli. Well to make a long story short Baloo enters the village takes Mowgli with him, in the process leading the the other 2 kids to believe that Mowgli is kidnapped (so of course instead of alerting their parents they decided to take on the forest and rescue him, as if….).

Unknown to all Mowgli’s old nemesis ‘Sher Khan is back in the jungle and is having an extremely difficult time of it. He’s become the joke of the jungle with the vultures flying behind him and cracking all sorts of jokes about his tail being on fire and such, obviously this drives the wily tiger to seek revenge, and now we have a complete cracker of a scenario or so Disney would like us to believe.

My Take

A major problem with this cartoon is that there just aren’t any well defined characters in this cartoon, they have just reintroduced all the old characters and given them sort of cameo appearences (that is excepting Baloo and Mowgli of course), there is mad character like ‘King Louie’ who adds such an interesting twist to the plot. Another problem with the cartoon is that none of the voices are the same except Sher Khan’s (thank god!), Baloo talks with a major slang which is a total turn off.

The songs are nowhere near the beauty of the original, I mean the original had such rhythmic tunes like ‘Bare Necessities’, ‘King of the Jungle’, then the background score when Mowgli runs away these things have stuck with me even today years after having last seen the cartoon but there are no songs to be talked about. Overall if you were to ask me should I see this, I would say no. But if you have kids real small say under 10, then maybe they might enjoy it. Also make sure they haven’t seen the original cartoon or else even they might not enjoy it.