Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, a new film adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, is now streaming on Netflix. This new version of the story of the boy raised by wolves brings an all-star cast and incredible special effects to make Kipling’s tales come to life.
Here are five questions you might have about Mowgli and, conveniently, their answers…
Who’s making the movie?
Mowgli comes courtesy of director, actor, and motion-performance master Andy Serkis. You probably remember him from his previous work as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the recent Planet of the Apes prequel trilogy. He’s a master of the kinds of effects that will fuel the mostly animal characters in the story, and he’s even taking a turn in front of the camera as well as the kind bear Baloo.
Serkis isn’t the only starpower behind Mowgli. Joining him is composer Nitin Sawhney, whose work has appeared in films, TV series, and video games. Mowgli’s cinematographer, Michael Seresin, has worked on several huge projects, including Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the two most recent Apes films.
Who’s in it?
Mowgli has an impressive cast behind both its human and animal characters. Alongside Serkis as Baloo, Christian Bale will play Mowgli’s other mentor, Bagheera the panther. Benedict Cumberbatch will play the villainous tiger, Shere Khan, and Cate Blanchett will be the voice behind Kaa, the enormous, hypnotic python. Rohand Chand will play the titular man-cub, and Freida Pinto and Matthew Rhys will play fellow humans Messua, a mother figure for Mowgli; and Lockwood, a hunter of questionable morality.
How much performance capture is there?
If you’re hoping for a bunch of hilarious behind-the-scenes pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch crawling around the floor in a ball-covered suit like he did when he played the dragon in The Hobbit, prepare to be disappointed.
Mowgli is going with a hybrid approach for its performance capture. Instead of the same actor providing the movements, voice, and expressions for the digital characters (like Serkis did in The Lord of the Rings), a couple different people will share acting duties for each role. Dedicated performance-capture artists will put on the ball suits to get the motions down. Meanwhile, the voice actors will do the talking while a different set of reference points gathers up their expressions.
The end result will be a CGI animal with the movements of one actor and the voice and face of another. So even if Cumberbatch isn’t going to be skulking around like a tiger (in front of the camera, anyway), Shere Khan will still kind of look like him.
How faithful to the book will it be?
Serkis aimed to keep his version of The Jungle Book as close to the themes of the original work as he could. These concepts, as he sees them, are pretty serious stuff.
“Ideologies, laws, tribes, belief-systems – whether they’re in the animal kingdom or in the human world – only serve to get you so far in life,” he says. “Ultimately, you have to be true to yourself and you have to make up your mind. Any form of absolutism keeps you blind.”
That’s not to say that Mowgli will look like Serkis and his crew simply fed Kipling’s pages directly into a camera. They’ve made a few changes. For one, Cate Blanchett plays the originally male snake, Kaa. And Khan’s sidekick Tabaqui, a jackal in the original, is a hyena in the new movie. That probably seems like a minor, almost trivial change, but try telling that to a jackal.
Why are there so many human characters?
You can’t make The Jungle Book without Mowgli, but Legend of the Jungle is about more than what happens when the hero realizes he has to return to be with his own people. It’s also about what happens when he gets there.
Kipling’s book includes the rough adjustment period after the boy returns to the world of humans. And even leaving the jungle doesn’t get him off of Khan’s shopping list. In order to really portray Mowgli as a character trapped between worlds, Serkis’ film has to show how he fares in both.
