Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
Director - Andy Serkis
Cast - Rohan Chand, Christian Bale, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto, Cate Blanchett, Matthew Rhys
Rating - 4/5

By giving Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle the appearance of something more mainstream, director Andy Serkis has disguised the most important achievements of his own film, and inadvertently distracted us from fully appreciating it. The danger is that most of the conversation about the movie will be restricted to its visual razzle-dazzle and its state-of-the-art motion capture effects - and not about its weighty themes.

Unlike, say, Avatar - a film with which it shares many similarities; technical and thematic - Serkis’ Mowgli is primarily about Rudyard Kipling’s (sometimes controversial) ideas. These are the same ideas that have been diluted over many years, thanks to the Jungle Book’s re-branding (by Disney) as a whimsical children’s tale and not, as Serkis insists, a story about man’s relationship with nature and other men.

Kipling was a ‘child of the British empire’, Serkis told me. He was born in Bombay and grew up speaking Hindi. When he was still a child, he was sent away to England, which he absolutely hated. This sense of not belonging to one place, of being caught between two worlds, is perhaps the central theme of Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle.

In one particulary excellent example o the risks this film is taking with its impressionistic re-imagining of Kipling’s stories, Mowgli (played by a very moving Rohan Chand) is banished from the jungle and sent to live with humans in the ‘man-village’. He is kept in a cage, poked at with sticks and gawked at by the other kids, who see him as a strange new creature - neither a man nor the wolf that he believes himself to be. He approaches his food on all fours, with childlike curiosity - a single moment that captures both aspects of his personality. But he can’t stomach it - the flavours of a cooked, seasoned meal send him retching into his corner. Mowgli is a feral child - the sort that pop up on the news from time to time, rescued after somehow surviving years in the wilderness. This is how he is supposed to behave; and not, as the classic Disney version showed, by falling in love with a girl and singing Bare Necessities.