Production of The Jungle Book (2016)
The Jungle Book (2016), hereafter JB16, was produced by Walt Disney Pictures, directed and co-produced by Jon Favreau, and written by Justin Marks. It was partly based on Disney’s original version but also drew more on Kipling’s original books, giving a rather darker tone. In some ways it is part of Disney’s on-going policy to create live action versions of its earlier animated classics (such as Cinderella released the previous year and Beauty and the Beast released the year after) but, although the film has some live action, by far the largest part of what is seen on screen was produced using CGI: ‘The Jungle Book exists in a strange limbo-world between live action and animation. Favreau admits he has no idea which category it falls into: ‘I think it’s considered live action because people feel like they’re watching a live action film,’ is as much as he’ll commit to’:
TASK: Read the following article.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/04/14/jon-favreau-interview-i-want-my-jungle-book-to-remind-people-how/
Favreau wanted the film to be part homage to the classic Disney films of the 1930s and 1940s: Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi: ‘I tell Favreau that his opening shot – a dreamy pull-back through undergrowth that slowly fades from hand-drawn into CG – reminded me of the slow pans through the forest at the start of Bambi, which Disney created on a then-groundbreaking ‘multiplane camera’ that brought the illusion of depth to 2D artwork. ...‘You found it. That was the shot’ he glows, before talking about scouring Bambi for ‘tonal clues’ as to how to balance danger, humour and emotion without scarring his younger audience for life.’
All the animals and landscapes etc were created on computers, mostly by the British digital effects house MPC.
http://www.moving-picture.com/film/filmography/the-jungle-book/
‘The animal characters were deliberately created with a realistic look, and not in a cute and cuddly cartoon-style as with the original animated Jungle Book film, in order to target older movie-goers.’
https://www.inquisitr.com/3011048/jungle-books-clever-marketing-tactics-that-caused-it-to-be-the-second-highest-weekend-grosser-ever/
‘In Jungle Book, if we just took everything that was in the ’67 film, that humour would have been too broad for a live action, and also you have to take into account that these look like real animals, so the intensity of it gets really notched up.’
http://collider.com/lion-king-jungle-book-2-jon-favreau-interview/#disney
However, apparently Disney were quite open to Favreau’s new approach in handling their characters (https://www.awn.com/animationworld/jon-favreau-looks-back-jungle-book) In
this article the film makers talk about the thinking behind the approach and the difficulties in following through with their ideas:
TASK: Read it and add to your notes.
http://beta.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-en-mn-0105-jungle-book-20170105-story.html
In terms of structuring the narrative, Favreau said, ‘We went back to the structure of it and saw what Kipling did because he offered a lot. We kind of picked between the two. The story structure of the 1967 film was good and offered a lot; so I stuck
to it as much as I could. What I have tried to do is to focus on the images that I remember from it before going back to look at it again.‘
(http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/jon-favreau-breathes-new-life-to-kipling-classic-the-jungle-book-116022400306_1.html)
JB16 included some of the original music from the 1967 version partly in order to compete with the Warner version that was simultaneously in production: ‘When Warners raced us on Jungle Book, we thought, Well, we’re putting ‘Bare Necessities’ in the movie because they can’t’ [Sean] Bailey said. ‘We have certain characters and certain depictions of characters and we’re going lean into that. It’s an advantage to us.’
(http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/beauty-and-the-beast-disneys-remake-machine.html)
Sean Bailey (the head of Production at the Studios) said that the team were able to call on Disney’s huge archives: ‘While developing projects, creative teams look at ‘every screenplay page that didn’t make it, every deleted scene, every conceptual drawing.’ There are still people at the company who worked on older films who can help inform the production, too. (When Favreau wanted additional lyrics for ‘I Wan’na Be Like You ‘ in The Jungle Book, he just asked original songwriter Richard Sherman.)’
(http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/beauty-and-the-beast-disneys-remake-machine.html)