The selling point of Mowgli has been its "dark" quality, in comparison to the song-and-dance animated Jungle Book feature and, for that matter, the more recent live adaptation (the film which came, saw, and conquered this one, cinematic-release speaking). In practice, this results in a kind of tonal dissonance: Mowgli's frequently light-hearted coming-of-age narrative runs smack into a much bloodier story about the ethics of hunting. (TL;DR: hunting for food, good; hunting for sport, bad.) As a result, it's not always clear whom the film is for, a problem accentuated by the sometimes odd CGI (Shere Khan and Father Wolf are especially...off) and the sometimes cartoonish, sometimes very brutal violence. Interestingly enough, Mowgli turns out to have its competitor's problem with the in-universe politics of Mowgli's identity as a human being, and yet solves them it in a way that arguably out-Kiplings Kipling.
Mowgli's narrative combines the Mowgli tales from the first Jungle Book, including Shere Khan's manipulation of wolfpack politics, Mowgli's kidnapping by the Bandar-Log (here just known as the Monkey People), and Mowgli's time in the village, although it concludes by foreshadowing his afterlife as Master of the Jungle in the Second Jungle Book (without mentioning that, in his late teens, he returns to his adoptive family). Moreover, there is a new addition who serves as a pivot point, a deconstructed Great White Hunter (seriously) with a drinking problem and the perhaps somewhat odd habit of lugging all of his hunting trophies around with him. (Lockwood's obsession with Shere Khan turns out to be a sort of discount Moby Dick plot.) . Much of the tension in the film's first half derives from a rite of passage nowhere in Kipling, the "running," which qualifies the cubs for full membership in the pack; Mowgli's physical inability to keep up with the other cubs, which marks him out as a "freak" alongside his runty albino friend Bhoot, would disqualify him, were it not that he learns to master tree-climbing instead. It is only Bagheera's deliberate intervention that cheats Mowgli out of winning the contest and inadvertently leads him to being captured by the Bandar-Log. Mowgli's desire to be accepted, just like everyone else--one of the most popular plots in all of children's and YA film--supplants the original story's explanation for the loathing with which the other wolves regard him: "The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man" ("Mowgli's Brothers"). Instead of the film's more generic "we're special!" with which Mowgli's buddy Bhoot tries to console him, the short story very clearly insists on the animals' instinctive recognition of human superiority. By the same token, the film displaces just about all of the nastiness of human nature (aside from some children being jerks) onto Lockwood, the aforementioned hunter; the villagers, it is made clear, have every right to want to eliminate Shere Khan (who is eating their cattle and, of course, has a history of eating them as well). Notably, Mowgli never speaks with another human being, although the stories emphasize that he picks up the language very quickly--a kind of distancing that makes it easier for him to abandon the village at the end in order to return to the jungle.
Structurally, as the film makes explicit in Kaa's concluding voiceover, Lockwood and Shere Khan are two aspects of the same violation of jungle law. Early on, Bagheera explains to Mowgli that hunting for food is both "sacred" and a "right," but one must never hunt for pleasure. Shere Khan, who kills cows for the fun of it (an especial violation of the law, as it brings humans into the jungle seeking vengeance), is the animal equivalent of Lockwood, a sportsman who displays rather than eats his kills. (It doesn't help that Lockwood's trophies include half of one of Hathi's tusks and, alas, the taxidermied Bhoot.) Lockwood's implied alcoholism functions similarly to Shere Khan's limp, inasmuch as both have problems with mobility (and, unfortunately for Lockwood, aiming). Moreover, it is clearly the manner of killing that is also at issue. First, in a reworking of the original, Akela evicts Mowgli from the pack for saving him with fire, a human weapon; later, Lockwood gifts Mowgli a knife with which to hunt. Mowgli's success at killing Shere Khan (here, with the help of elephants instead of buffalo) is the moment when he truly establishes himself as a successful man-wolf hybrid: Mowgli can kill Shere Khan because he isn't a wolf, and uses the knife to finally finish him off, but he also kills using the same intimacy prescribed by jungle law. Lockwood, by contrast, uses a gun, and the gunsight paradoxically makes him unable to see his own oncoming death. Having erased both the law-breakers and the overly-hidebound from the narrative--Akela dies fighting with Shere Khan, another deviation from Kipling--the film leaves the field open for Mowgli's creativity to rejuvenate jungle law. Being different, rather than being human, turns out to save the day--and yet, in the end, Mowgli's difference remains predicated on his being human.
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