Disney’s live-action 1994 adaptation stands out like a sore thumb. The most common criticism of the film is its piecemeal, vignette-like narrative, but in that respect it may be the truest to the original stories, which meander through time and space, telling Mowgli’s story episodically in between totally disparate characters and settings. The most well-known of the films, and probably the greatest propagator of the books and Kipling’s popular legacy to this day, is of course Disney’s 1967 adaptation, directed by Disney workhorse Wolfgang Reitherman. The Korda brothers adapted ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ into the 1937 film Elephant Boy (the only Jungle Book film adaptation to be released in Kipling’s lifetime) and loosely adapted the stories into 1942’s Jungle Book (so loosely that Kipling wasn’t even credited) and Chuck Jones, of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies fame, adapted three Jungle Book tales as TV short films in 19. The Jungle Book characters may be most associated with Disney today, but there are a few noteworthy non-Disney film adaptations. Of the roughly 100 animated films produced or co-produced by the various Disney film studios, nearly all of them have anthropomorphic characters, musical numbers, or both. It’s entirely possible that Kipling’s formula was subconsciously used as a template by Walt Disney and his creative team for virtually all of their animated feature films, and many of their short films. The Jungle Book was published only seven years before Walt Disney was born and was a bedside staple for boys and girls of his generation. He may not have been the first to combine anthropomorphism and song in children’s literature, but he was the most prominent of the 19th-century authors to do so. What’s more, Kipling was a pioneer in anthropomorphic storytelling, especially in The Jungle Books and Just So Stories.

His jungle was always intended to be full of music. The original songs in the ’67 film were written by the Sherman Brothers and Terry Gilkyson, and are never in danger of seeming superfluous to the film, as Kipling included songs in every story of The Jungle Books, as well as lyrical interludes between stories. Kipling had a great love of verse and liberally incorporated original poems and lyrics into most of his long list of short stories. Those who have read much of The Jungle Books, or any of Kipling’s short story collections, will notice a pattern that is eerily familiar to fans of Disney’s animated filmography. How Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book helped make the modern Disney, Part 2 In the second part of his essay on how Rudyard Kipling and ‘The Jungle Book’ influenced the modern Disney, Parker Lancaster takes a look at anthropomorphism, CGI and the success of previous adaptations…

The jungle book original story