5 Notes on “The Jungle Book”

I can’t let go of this film. When I hear Baloo singing I cannot sit still. It’s my personal “Shave and a haircut” tune. But in order to delve deeper, not just gush about the design\music\animation but discuss what I think makes this film a classic, I’ll share with you some comments on this film:

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1. I don’t like “journey films” and “The Jungle Book” is seemingly a straightforward journey film: Bagheera declared he is taking Mowgli from point A to point B and the film indeed begins and ends the way he described it. But the path isn’t linear. It also does not relate to the move from place to place, but rather from character to character. Moreover, the characters return at different points of the timeline, which reassert the feeling that this is not a geographical journey but a conceptual one.
2. Bagheera and Baloo are father-figure archetypes. Bagheera is the over-protective father, the one without whose supervision and support the child “won’t survive in the jungle”. Baloo, on the other hand, believes in natural education. According to him, the jungle is just the place to raise children as it provides all their needs. Some of you will probably mock me for only understanding this recently, but you might be surprised yourselves. In Baloo’s song “The Bare Necessities”we see Baloo explaining to Mowgli that the jungle has everything he needs in order to live. But what do we actually see? During this fairly short song Mowgli gets pricked, buried under a bunch of bananas, hit by a coconut, almost crushed by a rock and nearly drowned. As the “grand finale” he is kidnapped, too. Meaning, while Baloo sings about how easy it is to survive in the jungle the film shows us how wrong he is, every single moment (I know it sounds trivial). Overall, most of the characters in the book, who shape Mowgli along his journey, are male. What hints even more strongly at the jungle as a masculine place, where the dominant values are survival, violence, militarism, power and control, friendship, paternity, sacrifice and education. The female characters are Winifred, who undermines her husband’s hegemony (the elephant who wears the trousers in the house), the doe who’s almost devoured and, of course, the girl who seduces Mowgli into the human cultural world, into sexual and social maturing. Kaa and Shere Khan can also be seen as fatherly figures, or rather anti-fatherly. Kaa is an accepting figure. He wraps around Mowgli, and like the snake in “The Little Price” he promises Mowgli that with his aid he will be able to stay in the jungle forever. Shere Khan, on the other hand, like Captain Hook, sees in Mowgli’s presence in the jungle defiance against his old age and vulnerability to humans. The option he offer Mowgli, death, is a sort of eternal youth and never having to grow up. He exploits the aspect of the human death wish. King Louie is also a father in his own way, surrounded by male monkeys, the king of a banana republic in a ruined temple, and he is willing to adopt Mowgli in order to raise his imaginary status in his own eyes. No wonder Baloo managed to trick him when he dressed up as a female monkey. It seems he hadn’t seen a real female monkey for quite a while.
3. The characters! There’s no “storyline” in this film but there are characters. Disney wanted characters, and they’re the ones driving this film. Disney bought the rights for the book because he liked the general story and atmosphere. In fact, he wanted to use the book to create an independent work, and that’s what he did. However, he died during the work on the film and did not see it completed. The principle that claims the story is only secondary to the characters is one of the things I consider the “material truth” of animation. True, animation isn’t a genre but there is something that’s true about animation films. There are almost no “toons” in live films. There’s no such thing as a character whose existence exceeds the film in which it appears. In “The Jungle Book” each character is a world all on its own. And it exists outside the jungle, out of its context. Each character is autonomous. Another wonderful thing about the characters is how animal-like they are, even when they’re so well humanized.
4. The journey: Is there logic in Mowgli’s journey? Is it not just another collection of random characters with good music? I believe the journey must be examined with the cultural prism. Meaning what, according to the film, differentiates humans from animals. The first thing is human’s weakness and his inability to survive, which forces him to outsmart the animals and invent tools as means for survival. No! The first thing is the red loincloth Mowgli wears. A cloth that symbolizes the human embarrassment of exposing our privates, which refers to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. That same expulsion that this film also deals with, and the same claim: “the woman seduced me”. The third issue, which also exists in the book, though differently, is the disobedience. The jungle’s order is disrupted by the human, which made him superior. He is “above the law” of the jungle. And the fourth issue is fire. As in “Lord of the Flies”, which deals with the human who survives in nature far from human civilization, here too the fire is a key symbol. Shere Khan wants to kill Mowgli before he discovers fire. The king of the apes wants Mowgli to be his own Prometheus and reveal the secret of fire, because it will allow him to be like man in that aspect. There’s also a reference to the Tree of Knowledge. According to the Bible, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge would make humans “like God, knowing good and evil.” Meaning, by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge man rises to the level of Creator, and thus the secret of fire is the closing of that fundamental-existential gap between man and animal. Mowgli isn’t interested in the fire and its power, but at the climax he experiences a revelation of the burning bush (total deus ex machina: lighting hitting a tree) and thus in fact loses his virginity. At the moment of truth he uses fire, which represents his superiority and his foreignness in the animal world, in order to save Baloo. Baloo sacrificed himself, and by doing so he drew out the human animal in Mowgli. From here, the way to the civilized world is now short. From the moment that Mowgli holds the blazing torch he can no longer go back, and he is doomed to be taken to the humans on the other side of the fence.
5. The last point is betrayal. Mowgli is betrayed time and time again throughout the film: his mother abandons him, Bagheera who promises never to leave him deserts him, Baloo breaks his promise to let him stay in the jungle, Kaa seduces him in order to devour him and King Louie abuses him. The vultures also abandon him when he is in life-threatening danger. The jungle, which Mowgli wants to belong to, keeps turning its back on him. Betrayal and loneliness are central emotions in this “very happy” film. Mowgli, who seeks protective figures, finds himself wandering alone in the jungle, helpless and lacking basic survival skills. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden has already occurred, it’s fate, it’s a curse. Civilization is the escape from the alienation of the natural world. The family life and love that he did not get in the tough male world he came from can be realized in a world where there is a woman, a civilized world, a world in which man has an advantage over animal.