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Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle review – man-cub makes a pointless return

There are no songs and not much fun as director Andy Serkis’s ultra-realistic animation trudges into the uncanny valley

Just two years ago, the Walt Disney Company pulled off a very unexpected success – a state-of-the-art digital animated remake of its 1967 masterpiece The Jungle Book, the inspired adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling stories that was famously the last film Disney personally supervised. Against the odds, the new one was a triumph, with just a couple of the original songs, some ingenious new plot quirks and a whole lot of energy and fun. But now – bafflingly, boringly – there is yet another adaptation, by Warner Brothers and Netflix, a heavier and more cumbersome version directed by Andy Serkis, that master of mo-cap.

So we trudge back to the uncanny valley for another bout of ultra-realistic animation. No songs at all now, and not much fun. The new idea is a new transgression, a new interpretation of the law of the jungle, a loyalty crisis between Mowgli and the other animals, which puts the “man village” in front of the camera with some actual non-CGI human actors – making this seem like a superhero origin story.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2E3iHiT
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