Channeling his propensity for honest, human storytelling and casual idiosyncrasies, Jon Favreau found early success in 1996 when he wrote and starred in Swingers, a humble indie that earned covetable cult status. He later made a quantum leap over to the mainstream after finding his passion as an effects man in fantasy and sci-fi, vaulting to his current status as big studio director handling nine-figure budgets. Still, he never outgrew his roots: The Iron Man director, credited with gifting the $4 billion Marvel franchise a reputation not currently enjoyed by DC Comics, just two years ago turned his small-budget passion project about a dad and his food truck into a niche event film (Chef), relying mostly on word-of-mouth to sell tickets.
There’s a poem by the late Robert A. Ward that begins, “I wish you the courage to be warm when the world would prefer that you be cool.” Ward’s sentiment, combined with Favreau’s voracious appetite for being at the forefront of an evolving cinematic landscape, mostly explains the heart of The Jungle Book, Favreau’s new real-world re-imagining of the classic Disney animated film. It melds two cornerstones of Favreau’s career: venturing into the digital frontier, and having the courage to be warm.
The curtain rises on the computer-generated animal kingdom as the camera pans across one of The Jungle Book’s many breathtaking virtual sets, which were built after recording the raw footage in an empty Los Angeles warehouse. Essentially, on set, actors in motion-capture suits ran around with Neel Sethi, who makes his movie debut as Mowgli, in front of blue and green screens. Favreau and his team then used a camera system known as Simulcam, which was developed for Avatar, to capture, in real time, CG environments superimposed on a physical production set, allowing filmmakers to see exactly how something would look on-screen and then make the necessary tweaks on the spot, meaning every aspect of the image, organic or otherwise, could align and interact with perfect precision. And the results are astounding.
Where the level of technology in The Jungle Book has historically been used for maximizing the wow factor in Michael Bay explosion-packed action flicks, Favreau makes the case for special effects that actually affect. Calling the visuals simply “realistic” wouldn’t do them justice, nor would it be technically accurate. Low-angle shots of the simulated Indian jungle, with richer colors, lusher plant life and bigger animals than anything found in the wild, toe the line between immersion and submersion. A baby elephant, typically about three feet tall, has at least a foot on Sethi, who is all legs and limbs. The real-life counterpart to Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley, ever stately), a black panther and Mowgli’s honorary godfather, averages two-and-a-half feet in height, but the tips of Bagheera’s shoulders hit just below the top of Mowgli’s head. Favreau and his fleet of production designers and effects artists construct spectacularly vivid set pieces to remind older audiences how they may have imagined Mowgli’s journey as children. Several shots are designed after some of the most iconic images of the genre—Mufasa’s final scene in The Lion King, the chicken-sized Compy dinosaurs who get the best of Peter Stormare in The Lost World— all helping to combine familiar stories with new technologies, tapping into our nostalgia and repurposing it on a grander scale.
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