Skip to main content

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle review – a stunningly strange beast

Mowgli, Baloo and co get a visually dazzling upgrade, but there’s too much animal trauma to make this child-friendly

Originally slated for release in 2016, this Andy Serkis-directed Kipling adaptation was shelved and finally sold to Netflix – it’s getting a limited cinema release just before its launch on the streaming platform – partly to avoid competing with Disney’s live-action remake of The Jungle Book. But I can’t help but suspect that there are other issues at play here, not least the fact that it’s hard to pin down just who its audience is meant to be. There’s rather too much peril and bleeding animal trauma for it to work for a family audience without horrifying younger members. But the association with The Jungle Book means that I can’t imagine adult audiences flocking to see it. It’s a pity, because this is a visually striking, technologically impressive picture.

The jungle is a richly realised backdrop, dense with lurking dangers and creeping, crawling biomass. The slight uncanny valley effect of the motion capture performances notwithstanding, the computer generated animals are largely persuasive as both flesh and blood creatures and as characters. Bagheera the panther, with his rippling oil slick of a coat, exudes so much star quality, you almost forget he’s a CGI special effect.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2E7Z60M
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more