Tonight you can watch a particularly interesting fantasy adventure on TV. The remake of The Jungle Book comes up with remarkable effects.
Disney has remade many of its animated classics as live-action films in recent years. One of the most successful titles is 2016’s The Jungle Book, which once again follows the adventures of the human boy Mowgli as he befriends talking animals in the jungle in this fantasy adventure.
The story of the film is based on the Jungle Book tales by Rudyard Kipling, which have already been adapted by Disney once before, namely in the course of The Jungle Book anno 1967. But how do you bring the talking animals from an animated film into a live-action film on the big screen?
Fantasy adventure: why The Jungle Book is so important for current blockbusters
The Jungle Book is a seminal film for the evolution of the current film and series landscape. In order to combine a real main character with computer-generated animals, director Jon Favreau had to come up with some (digital) tricks. With his work on The Jungle Book, he laid one of the foundations for the technology that currently fuels numerous Disney, Marvel and Star Wars projects: the Volume.
You can watch the trailer for The Jungle Book here:
The Volume is a studio environment where digital backgrounds appear on huge LED walls, so that the actors see the world during filming just as we do as viewers in the cinema or on TV. The technology evolved from Favreau’s work on The Jungle Book and The Lion King, among others, where virtual sets and virtual cameras were used excessively.
In most scenes of The Jungle Book, Mowgli actor Neel Sethi is the only “real” element. Both the jungle and the animals are from the computer. Similar to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the animals were brought to life using motion-capture techniques. By means of reference points, all movements of the actors can be transferred to a CGI model.
Is The Jungle Book even a live-action film, one might ask at this point. If nothing else, this discussion has also flared up with the Lion King remake, which basically has no real images, only photorealistic shots from the computer. The big difference is that The Jungle Book features a flesh-and-blood main character, something The Lion King cannot claim.
