[Off-topic] Jungle Book, and modern movie magic

Absolutely hypnotic

So I recently watch the new Jungle Book. That's a weird name for me that I have a mixed reaction of loving or "meh"ing about. I'm going to state an unpopular opinion and say the famous animated Disney classic was more forgettable to me than the entirely weird spin-off talespin series, I haven't bothered with the classic book and only just now learned it was actually a shorts collection (but I do want to read it, and plan to soon), so the purists wont be any happier with my views. Yet I should in theory love this kind of story. The thing I remember and loved the most when I was little from this series is 1998's Mowgli's Story (uh, yeah this embarrassing movie). Now don't get me wrong, Mowgli's story is objectively worse and only worth watching now to have a laugh at what I used to enjoy, because its childish and beyond goofy in its direction. Still... something stuck out that made me want to come back to it more so than the animated film. That's especially weird considering how much I adore animation over live-action, but here we are again. Ever since I heard about Disney redoing their animated classics in live-action, Jungle book was on my mind and was one of the only things I felt optimistically about (in addition there's Hunchback, and maybe beauty & the beast. That's about it off the top of my head). Why on earth do I prefer a mostly animal themed movie being set in live-action when they could be done better in full animation? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. However it is what it is, but it also means bringing out the much dreaded three-letter C-word in live-action film: CGI! Okay so that's technically a 3-letter acronym, but whatever. Point remains that people love to hate it, and yet here I am watching this incredibly praised modern live-action + CGI adaptation of an old animated classic, based on a classic and historic piece of literature.

However I've never understood the problem with CGI. I think that's in large part due to how easily I can suspend disbelief, and get immersed and enjoy entertainment because its fun and not meant to be taken seriously. I can endure the "uncanny valley" movies that get fussed at, and I don't exactly get why something that looks slightly animated in a real scene has to be a bad thing. Unless its so bad you can see the seams, like a few scenes in Gods of Egypt,  its good enough to still be entertaining. Even if you can see the seams, it might still be an alright movie. It might also be because I grew up around early 3D gaming, and its my favorite kind of entertainment. The entire freakin' thing is essentially CGI, and yet I'm enjoying that, so why can't I enjoy a movie that may use even a fraction of it? But the thing is I'm far from the only gamer, so I still don't get what's with all the fuss. Even if you claim "b-but, its not real, and I know that, so I can tell the difference and its bad!" I have to ask where were you with the muppets era, where the cast was obviously fake soft puppet people with awkwardly flapping jaws set up against real-ish stuff. Why is old yoda so much better than new yoda if what you care about is flesh-and-blood realism in your live-action? Why is Roger Rabbit such a big classic? I just don't get the double standards. Whatever though, I guess we got past those hurdles, because I'm so happy to say that Disney is shutting these people up as far as I've been able to tell.

He's fake, but his wrath and presence is all there

I remember watching some of the extra material in regards to how Zootopia was made, and how Disney was pushing huge boundaries in CGI based technology. I didn't think all that effort went into animating fur, but apparently in as little as 2009's Bolt they could barely bother to model a normal dog with a collar. Now they were making complicated human-like animals with full clothing, and under all sorts of extreme conditions like rain and high-speed chases. Up to a hundred-thousand hair pieces were being rendered as fur on one of the many characters on the screen at any time. That sounded awesome and yet way more complicated than I'd think, but that's all I thought of it there. Jungle Book on the other hand shattered assumptions and my mind, because I was assuming this was traditional work being done here for animals in a live-action movie. Once upon a time, this kind of movie was done with trained animals. That's how Mowgli's story was done, with effects (or mostly editing) attempting to gloss it up a bit, and then we all wound up hating it despite their efforts with real things. Naturally I thought this was that in the modern age, with a bigger budget, more care, and better tech to enhance expressions and dialogue (really big enhancements to get full mouth-moving dialogue, and some of the fur effects). The whole time I watched the movie, I had that sort of assumption and never thought otherwise once, save for obvious un-animal type guys like the massive monkey king.

WRONG! In the "Jungle Book Re-imagined" bonus feature, it revealed every single one of those guys (and scenes) were CGI with the only references being mo-capped actors, and some of the silliest little hand-puppets ever. I'm talking like bright yellow little toony monster men puppets that would later be critters like the porcupine or pangolin, and a disembodied rubber panther face. To recap, the last Disney movie attempt at this with real actors and animals failed so hard it never got beyond a VHS release (and currently hides in the corners of netflix like some unwanted ugly ducking), and the one we all love and are talking about right now was made up of everything being fake outside of the kid. Oh and Unlike Mowgli's story, we can all be more sure that this is a true child actor, so even the one real on-screen actor falls under something people tend to hate on. It all just magically works. With a guy like me that was already tolerable of CGI, seeing the bonus feature with how fake things really were is like being tricked into thinking Santa Clause is real all over again.

Take a good look. This somehow did better than real animals

Its not just the animals and that one fire effect either, its so much as the jungle ground being simulated through a strange combination of computer and puppetry reference props. In order to capture Mowgli just walking in the jungle for a scene, they would put him on this giant blue rotating floor-piece. It gave a sense of motions, and gave the actor a real walk and pace to set, and then to add to it because they were thinking of everything, there were little slops and bumps because the jungle ain't flat. They essentially paint it over like a video game cut-scene that doesn't have to worry about your hardware specs, then its all done and good as desired, complete with a friendly bear talking like Bill Murray (a casting choice I was originally skeptical about). That's pretty awesome, and it almost seems like CGI is overlapping with practical effects in that kind of situation. They're not working with nothing, they're working with almost nothing, and making up a couple of interesting effects that'll play with the lighting, set a pace with the room, and then they wave the magical CGI wand over it and it becomes an entire jungle. That is incredible.

For all that trickery and CGI magic I'm talking about, the movie does nothing to hide it in-film either. Mowgli is constantly thrown up against these make-believe things that aren't really there. He hugs them, he's pushed by them, he drums on baloo's chest, he grabs a buffalo's horn and rides on top of it, and camera will hang onto those effects for as long as they damn-well need to be to make the scene great. There's one emotional scene towards the beginning involving that threatens to make people cry, and only didn't have me cry not because of the CGI, but because it was probably just too early in the movie (and I was fighting the urge). Its able to make powerful scenes like that happen without fear, because they have the magic show ready to pull and keep this illusion over your eyes for almost 2 hours of film.

Too soon movie! Don't make me cry!

On that note, I'll shut up about the CGI for a second to say the movie itself is fantastic. I'm not a movie critic or anything, so don't take my word too strongly, but everything was just perfect as far as I'm concerned. I think this was the first live-action disney film I can name that carried and had the same powerful sense of pace, tone, fun, and adventure of their animated works I grew up loving so much. Stuff like Enchanted was more of a generic movie to me with a disney satire tone over it, and then stuff like Pirates of the Caribbean feels like they're in their own separate format and tone. This felt like a true Disney film with all the power, heart, and adventure I'd expect that makes you think of Disney at their grade A best. In the bonus feature I mentioned earlier, they brought up a cliche'd expression I've heard all too many times before: They were to give you a window into another world. I always enjoyed that phrase as a true expression for good art, but never before have I looked at it so literal. My astonishment as to just how great the film was, and yet seeing just how insanely fake it was, feels like some grand magical delusion on a scale I'm just not used to facing. These guys aren't just movie makers, they're magicians who have created such a window and kept an old stories from over a century ago alive and retold in the modern era, and it feels great to see it all under a light where it feels real.

I think that might also have helped me answer that question about myself: Why live-action for jungle book? Why not the incredible art of animation that I love way more? Well simply put, there are certain stories that need to be those windows into a different reality, and this is just one of them. This is the tale of an odd boy living in a natural world in a strange way, its strangely a very human sort of story despite all the animals. Then seeing clips of the old 2D animation, it just doesn't capture that idea and get that feeling across. Its a weird shade of colors, quirky newspaper comic type character designs, and its just not what I'd want from that kind of story. There's a huge difference in tone from what I've been talking about, and this. I'm sure its a fantastic movie in its own right, and a fun classic that still holds up, but its not what I'd want from a Jungle Book story and so I've had little interest with that Disney classic. This 2016 movie on the other hand...