How Jungle Book director Jon Favreau updated Kipling’s classic for 21st century
Rudyard Kipling’s story is rooted in antiquated ideas about race, nature and identity – all of which had to be confronted by team producing a new film version for a new century
Jon Favreau has a strategy for adapting a classic – remember what you liked about it in the first place.
That’s the approach the Iron Man and Chef director took when Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn charged him with updating Rudyard Kipling’s 19th century Jungle Book tales using contemporary digital filmmaking tools.
Modernising The Jungle Book meant more than rendering its animal cast in zeros and ones; it also required refreshing a story with a complex legacy rooted in antiquated ideas about race, nature and identity.
Like many people, Favreau first experienced Kipling’s stories of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle, as a child himself through Walt Disney’s whimsical 1967 animated musical. Favreau remembered the catchy song Bear Necessities, the spooky snake hypnotising Mowgli and the character of King Louie, a comical giant ape voiced by Louis Prima. All appear in the new Jungle Book, with some key changes, including a tweak to King Louie’s species and mien, the addition of some female characters and an updated view of the jungle itself.
“This was an opportunity to tell a story for now,” Favreau says. “Things have shifted. In Kipling’s time, nature was something to be overcome. Now nature is something to be protected.”
Tonally Favreau had to strike a balancing act, retaining the buoyant spirit of the 1967 film, including some of its memorable songs, while crafting a movie with more realism and peril. The script by Justin Marks draws heavily on Kipling’s lyrical language – including a key verse that “the strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf”. But the story also pulls from a broad range of cinematic inspirations, including the child-mentor relationship in the 1953 western Shane, the establishment of rules in a dangerous world from 1990’s Goodfellas and the use of a shadowy jungle figure in 1979’s Apocalypse Now.