Disney Movie Countdown Day 19 - Jungle Book

When I was very young, we had a black lab named Bogey. He was awesome, but he wasn't yard trained. One day, my brother had a friend over who opened the front door too wide and Bogey dashed outside, into the highway and was killed by a car. This day would be the first time I saw Jungle Book. It was a way to help cheer me up, and being young and not quite understanding what had happened, it worked. To this day though, I get a little choked up when it looks like Baloo has died.

Now that you're all saddened by that story, I'm pleased to report that the Jungle Book is still a nearly perfect movie. It stars many of Disney's more famous voice actors. This movie includes the voices of Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, The Narrator for the Whinnie the Pooh stories, Little John from Robin Hood, The Cheshire Cat, Jasper from 101 dalmatians, and on and on. It also stars music Legend Louis Prima as King Louis the Orangutan, whose musical style permeates the film. The music in this film is better than you remember; I'd forgotten about Kaa's lullaby and the vultures Barbershop quartet number done in the style of the Beatles.

I was curious to see if Jungle Book would be overtly racist, being based on a Rudyard Kipling story, and produced by the studio that brought us Song of the South. Honestly though, I didn't see it. You could argue that it's a metaphor for segregation, blah, blah, blah, but I think they do a great job of showing a very diverse and complicated jungle hierarchy that makes it abundantly clear that a 10 year old boy needs to live in a village to be safe. It has more in common with Into the Wild than Song of the South, and I was very happy to see that. Tomorrow, I think I will be watching Winnie the Pooh. It'll be nice to see the voice of Kaa trying to eat Honey rather than Christopher Robin (the voice of mowgli).

9.5/10

On a totally random note, I thought it was very amusing that the monkeys, an animal renowned for its tendency to fling poo, were fans of scat music. So, cherish that thought, I guess....