The title ‘Jungle Book’ almost universally
conjures up thoughts of the famous Disney film from 1967, so if you’re looking
for praise of that film here then you’ll be disappointed before the end of this
sentence. With a slow plot, lazy animation, boring and tedious songs, and
nothing really to say as a work of art, ‘The
Jungle Book’ film is one of my
least favourite efforts from the Disney company. The ‘Bear Necessities’ song in
particular is dreadful; well, maybe it’s not actually a bad song, but it
seriously wears out its welcome long before it’s over, and then they bring it
up again and again throughout the rest of the film, so that by the start of the
second rendition of it you’re sick of it, and with its final reprisal at the
end it ruins the relief at the thought that the film is finally over.
And I never really, as a child, could get over the paradox
of a film calling itself a book. Most film adaptations of written works can get
away with using the same title, but for this film in particular to call itself ‘The Jungle Book’ is absurd. The thing
it’s based on, the Rudyard Kipling book, makes a lot more sense; it’s an
anthology of seven short-stories, most of which take place in 19th
century India; only three of the stories concern Mowgli, and these stories and
characters have been mutated beyond all recognition in an attempt to make them
palatable to the company’s target audience. Now, I’m not normally critical of
Disney films taking huge liberties with their source material as they can
usually create a decent film that stands up on its own merits – it’s just that
for The Jungle Book – the film – not
only doesn’t resemble in any way the Mowgli stories from the book, but it was
also a dull, lifeless thing to watch.
So, to stop berating the Walt Disney company, who have
before and since produced many much better things, let’s sit down and actually
review the book. The first three stories all feature Mowgli, a human boy raised
by wolves in the jungle, taught how to master his environment by Bagheera the
panther and Baloo the bear. Mowgli’s life has been marked by Shere Khan the
tiger ever since he was a baby, but with the protection and tutorship of the
wolves, of Bagheera and Baloo, and of Kaa the python, Mowgli survives until he
is old enough to strike out on his own, eventually confronting and killing
Shere Khan. These first three stories are good, quite dark in tone, and
probably worth a read. There is no King Louie in sight, but Mowgli’s abduction
by monkeys is the subject of the second story, and it is in this that we meet
Kaa the python – the character who was most abused in the writing-rooms of
1960s Disney. Far from the comical and slightly pathetic trickster seen in the
film, Kaa is actually a terrifying, demi-godlike individual who is able to take
on the entire monkey-clan of the Cold Lairs virtually single-handed (to pardon
a pun). Baloo the bear, also, is very different, a wise and serious individual
who does not in any way resemble an easy-going layabout, while Bagheera the
panther is rather impulsive and generally quite friendly to Mowgli.
Of the remaining four stories in The Jungle Book, they are about, in order, a white seal who wants
to find a safe haven for his seal colony, a mongoose who gets taken in by a
family of English colonists who finds himself battling with a couple of cobras
in the garden, a boy and his venerable old elephant, and a collection of
animals used by the Indian Army who discuss and argue about their varying
experiences of the world. Each story – including the Mowgli stories – is sandwiched
between two poems relating to the story in some way. Each of them have their
moments, and the variety is mildly interesting, but none of them held any
particular fascination for me. The Mowgli stories were definitely the best, for
they give more time for investment in characters, the subject-matter and setting
are more interesting, and they read like sort of simplistic mini-epics.
Of course we can now consider The Second Jungle Book, Kipling’s sequel to his original batch of
tales. Capitalizing on the clear superiority of the Mowgli stories to the
miscellaneous others, this collection includes five stories on the Mowgli series,
and intersperses the miscellaneous chapters between them rather than tacking
them in on to the end like the first book does. Kaa is given more time in the
spotlight, Mowgli has greater development as a character, and the whole series
is finished off in a very definite sense at the end. It’s simple, and
relatively satisfying. Of the miscellaneous stories, one concerns a man in a
powerful government position in the provinces, who one day leaves his job to become
a wandering holy man; one is about a crocodile, a jackal and a stork who talk
inanely to one another for a whole forty pages in which nothing happens, while
the last is about a tribe of Inuit battling to survive in the frozen lands of
the Arctic. I quite liked the story about the holy man and the one about the
Inuit, while the one about the crocodile, jackal and stork was as dull as can
be imagined. Altogether, if you liked The
Jungle Book, then the sequel is pretty much just more of the same, with a
tad more Mowgli and more conclusion.
So then, is it worth reading these Rudyard Kipling books? I
can see no harm in doing so, although they have hardly changed my life for
having entered it. I admit I preferred reading the original Mowgli stories to
watching the Disney film, and one or two of the other stories were relatively
memorable, but overall with these things I’d say take them or leave them. They’re
nice to familiarise yourself with, but overall they’re not dramatically
special.
Bibliozon
Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. Macmillan and Co:
Edinburgh. (1926 [First Published 1894])
Kipling, Rudyard. The Second Jungle Book. Macmillan and
Co: Edinburgh. (1926 [First Published 1895])
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