The Jungle Book

[osprey_archer]

In the days of my youth, Baloo was my favorite character in The Jungle Book ("The Bear Necessities," clearly the best part of the movie! Possibly I learned all the wrong life lessons from this film), and I still like him now, but rewatching the movie this week I had a new appreciation for Bagheera, who I always saw as kind of a killjoy. All he wanted to do was protect Mowgli! Even though that means forcing Mowgli to leave the forest and go live with boring old human beings!

I was 100% on board with Mowgli's "I want to stay in the forest!" thing, and I totally didn't get the ending, where he throws it all over because... he sees a girl drawing water from the pond?? It occurs to me now that this is the same basic story arc as Fern in Charlotte's Web: human child abandons talking animal friends for the lure of heterosexual love! I found it baffling there, too. Why would anyone abandon their talking animal friends for anything???

In general as a child I found early Disney romance plots incomprehensible. I've been thinking recently about the extent to which our understanding of something as "romantic" is culturally determined - originally I was thinking about this in the context of queer romances, about the way that people who aren't in queer spaces often just don't see queerness even when it's right under their noses (exhibit A: my mother didn't realize that the leads in Briarley, a Beauty and the Beast retelling, were going to get together until they actually kissed), but it occurs to me that actually humans have to be taught to recognize heterosexual romances, too, it's just that this tends to occur when we're so young that we forget it's something we learned.

Comments

[kore]

I think as a kid I found Disney romance plots mostly annoying, because that meant an end to adventures and the end to the story. Same thing with fairy tales. "But I want to hear what happened AFTER that!" "There isn't any 'after that' after 'happily ever after.'" "Well, that's stupid." I have never been happy with endings.

My dad used to read the Jungle Book to me when I was very small (my fave chapter was the one about the seals) until I demanded to try to read it for myself. My dim memory is there were a bunch of Disney re-releases when I was a kid (must have been in San Francisco) and this was one of them. My burning indignation at 'THIS IS NOT LIKE THE BOOK' kind of blots out all the other details. That was the first time I was highly pissed at a movie adaptation of a favourite story but definitely not the last!

[osprey_archer]

I hadn't read The Jungle Book, but I feel you about the pain of movie adaptations in general. I don't understand why someone would spend a lot of money acquiring the rights to a book and then change it entirely??? Whyyyyy.

[kore]

Oh man, I know a lot of people who liked it but this exact thing ROYALLY pissed me off about the TV adaptation of Haunting of Hill House. Especially since that book deserves a good adaptation!

[osprey_archer]

I've never seen the adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, precisely because from everything I've heard it's basically a completely different story. Why even??? Why pretend it's a retelling when really it's something completely different.

[kore]

Yeah, from everything I have heard, the HORRIBLE adaptation with Lili Taylor (how, how do you waste Lili Taylor, Liam Neeson, AND Catherine Zeta-Jones) was more faithful than the TV series, and that movie went off the deep end. -- And now there's going to be a second season presumably even more removed from the book than the first one? Just....why?