JUNGLE BOOK (1942) ** This one is more faithful to Rudyard Kipling's original story than the wildly popular-and better as a film-'60s version. Kipling was a versatile writer but he did not write cartoons. Zoltan Korda never attains anything like critical mass as an entertainment vehicle, but he does endow the work with an appropriate sense of gravitas. Of course back in those days they had a lot fewer templates to copy, particularly in terms of talking animal movies and naturalist sentimentalism, so it's probably even less fair than usual to linger on the faults. The actors all look right, but no one offers anything that might be confused with a compelling performance. The humans' personality characteristics are only slightly more discernible than those of the animals, smiling or snarling or contemplating at us from stock footage that must have seemed spectacular at the time. It's probably more interesting to speculative sociologists than philosophers, and that's against Kipling. It's probably more interesting to film students than contemporary children, and that's against the point of talking animal movies.
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