The Jungle Book Re-Imagined

This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Hawkes, Lesley (2017) The Jungle Book Re-Imagined. In Childrens Media Symposium, 2017-11-24 - 2017-11-24. (Unpublished) This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/122454/ c 2017 The Author This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the document is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] License: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. Re-imagining Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book Introduction There have been at least four feature films (The Jungle Book, 1967, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book 1994, The Jungle Book 2, 2003 and The Jungle Book 2016) of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book with another due in October 2018. There is also talk that Disney will release a follow up to its successful 2016 version. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book was published in 1893 and is set in Seoni (Kipling spells in Seeonee) in Madhya Pradesh, India. Kipling had spent a lot of time in India. He had been born in Mumbai (Bombay at that time) in 1865, had left at a young age to be educated in Britain and had returned in 1882. However, he had never been to Seoni. He based his descriptions in the stories on retellings of the landscape from friends who had spent time there on vacation and on books by Robert Armitage Strendale and William Sleeman.i When a fan sent Kipling a letter requesting information on the accuracy of the jungle landscape Kipling wrote back, ‘I should be the last to deny the accuracy of your geography, but in fact I never went to Seoni’ (Ghate, 2007, 1).ii Rudyard Kipling’s original story is filled with colonial ideas of institutional power and control and much has been written on the imperialist point of view evident in his writing. The latest film versions of The Jungle Book have attempted to distance themselves from colonial points of view but they still retain an anthropocentric point of view. The animals have agency and their own voice but their intelligence is still viewed through a human lens. There is also a strong hierarchy of animals with the young male human placed at the top of this hierarchy. The 2016 version of The Jungle Book (John Favreau, 2016)iii stays away from colonial ideas and allows a more nonhuman philosophy to emerge but even this film has strong binaries of good animals and bad animals. This article explores the 2016 film adaptation of The Jungle Book and Kipling’s original stories and examines how the animals and the land are framed by 1 an anthropocentric lens. It also explores how narrative boundaries are beginning to be pushed and subverted to reveal nonhuman imaginings and stories. Human Centred Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book begins with Tabaqul- the Dish-licker jackal looking for food scraps and being shamed for his habits by the superior wolf pack (they are called the Free People). A discussion occurs on why all animals should not eat humans: ‘The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner, or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches’.iv It is also ‘un-sportsmen-like’ to hunt humans because they are physically weak. From the beginning of Kipling’s story strict moral rules and laws are set up. Humans, white men in particular, are seen as having technology and power and the desire to enact revenge upon the animals. Escaping the clutches of Shere Khan (the tiger), a small human male child enters the wolves’ den and is taken in by caring wolf-parents: ‘a naked brown baby who could just walk.’v Mother Wolf’s maternal instinct is so strong she cannot pass up the opportunity to care for a lost, playful and brave man cub who is alone and needs help: ‘How little! How naked, and – how bold!’vi The 2016 film version takes a very different approach to framing the story. It begins with a young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) swinging through the trees and in full adventure mode. We only hear of how he got to the jungle through a flashback section when he is lost in the hypnotic eyes of Kaa the python (Scarlett Johansson). The original stories place more emphasis on the effect of being brought up within a family of wolves. The wolves are represented as being of a superior class and standard and see it as their rightful duty to protect the man-cub. In comparison the film version emphasises the independence and individuality of Mowgli. Justin Marks wrote the screenplay for the film 2 and based it on both of the Jungle Books. However, Marks’ story is more about the coming together of an individual child, an individual bear, a black- panther, a tiger, and a snake, than the original stories. The original stories emphasised species and types. Marks has removed ideas of essentialism and the idea that all animals belonging to one species are the same. Kipling’s stories are more essentialist in tone and they set up that the narrator knows the animals in a universal and all-knowing manner. Shefali Rajamannar finds that, ‘Kipling thought of the animals in terms of fixed essence’.vii Each animal stands in for and represents its species. Kipling puts forward the idea that one of Shere Khan’s greatest flaws is that he acts as an individual who does not follow community rules but thinks only of himself: “He has no right!” Father Wolf began angrily—“By the law of the Jungle he has not right to change his quarters without due warning.”’viii Shere Khan is dangerous because he thinks for himself and does not follow conventions. Tharini Viswanath writes, “Indeed, one has power when he/she establishes a sense of individuality and the capacity to act consciously independent from his/her social group” (Viswanath 2017, 3). Tess Cosslett writes, ‘many of Kipling’s stories depend on a narrator who has inside knowledge of some secret or esoteric society, culture or organisation’ix. The narrator in Kipling’s stories relays seemingly truthful and insider information about animals and laws to the reader. Cosslett finds that Kipling’s stories promote the idea that adults know what the differences are between animals and humans and adults know how each species is defined. They have knowledge of an ‘adult truth’ which they pass on to children.x The film allows for a more subtle understanding of each animal to occur. The animals appear to have a more developed and complex personality which is not known by Mowgli until he spends time with each of them and they choose to tell him their stories. This is an interesting point of difference. The animals have a backstory and history and they reveal these stories in their own time. For instance Baloo saves Mowgli from being eaten by Kaa but only so he can use 3 Mowgli to get honey. Baloo does not see the human as someone higher up than him on any hierarchal chain but rather as someone he can use for his own gains. Mowgli slowly learns the complexity of Baloo. In the book Baloo is the teacher of the young wolves. He teaches them the law of the Jungle and has a freedom to roam because he only eats ‘nuts and roots and honey.’ He is not a threat to the power structure in any form. His role in the stories is solely as teacher to the wolves, Mowgli and the readers. He is a narrative plot driver. In the movie he has a more developed and rounded role. Location As mentioned earlier Rudyard Kipling was not in the Indian jungle when he wrote the story. He was actually living in Vermont in New England in the United States. The 2016 film version is also not shot in India but rather in a warehouse in Los Angeles. Sune Borkfelt finds artistic depictions of animals and landscapes have ‘helped shape human perceptions of animals, nature, and the parts of the world where they reside’.xiThe images in the film are visually striking but the constructed settings and animals take away from the specifics of the landscape. The photorealistic digital renderings make the land and the animals believable but in a hyperreal fantastic way. In many instances the film resembles an epic Gothic spectacle. Perhaps, one should expect this from a director whose previous films include Iron Man (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010) and Cowboys and Aliens (2011). Seoni is a location in central India and today, in a somewhat ironic twist, contains the Pench Tiger Reserve.

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