Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Our summer tour of animated films continued this week with Hercules (which I believe I wrote about some time ago; I'll dig about for a link later) and The Jungle Book.

I've never been able to really make up my mind about The Jungle Book. It's something of a classic, I guess, and while I greatly enjoy parts of it, I've never been able to really embrace it, and I didn't figure out why until just this week. My problem with the film is this:

I don't care one whit about Mowgli.

Yep, that's right: I can honestly say that I have no interest whatsoever in the main character of The Jungle Book. Mowgli is pretty much of a cipher, meandering through the film from one mini-adventure to another. All those mini-adventures are enjoyable, but I never get the feeling that Mowgli is a real person who is actually growing or learning or developing. I get the feeling that I'm simply expected to care about him and his exploits, by virtue of his being a cute-as-a-button kid who gets in a lot of scrapes, some of which through no fault of his own. But the thing is, Mowgli doesn't so much grow as gain experience, which isn't really the same thing. He doesn't start out with a wrong set of values and then become a better person, nor does he learn any great lesson (although he does receive a series of smaller lessons); Mowgli is basically a tabula rasa whose brain is filled over the course of the movie until he spots a girl, and when he would theoretically become interesting as a character, the movie ends. Oh well…Disney's more recent Tarzan film covers a lot of this same territory, and looking from the standpoint of the "orphan boy raised by the jungle beasts" character, that film is far more successful.

But I can't really dislike The Jungle Book, either - - because those mini-adventures of Mowgli's are so entertaining and fun. The elephant marching patrol always cracks me up, with its "stiff-upper-lip" British military attitude; ditto the goofy monkeys who inhabit something that looks like Angkor-Wat. Of course, Balou (the friendly fellow who sings the film's signature song, "Bare Necessities") is a delight; and those buzzards always crack me up. ("What are we gonna do?" "I dunno, what you wanna do?" "I dunno, let's do something." "OK, so what you wanna do?") So that's my take on The Jungle Book, the only movie I've ever seen where I probably would not have been bothered that much if the evil tiger had managed to consume the hero. Go figure.