Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. 2018 16+ 1h 44m Dramas. English, English, Spanish, Hindi, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese. Christian Bale Cate Blanchett Benedict Cumberbatch Naomie Harris Andy Serkis Rohan Chand Peter Mullan Jack Reynor Eddie Marsan Tom Hollander Louis Ashbourne Serkis Matthew Rhys Freida Pinto.
The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story | |
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Directed by | Nick Marck |
Produced by | Mark H. Ovitz |
Written by | José Rivera Jim Herzfeld |
Based on | The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling |
Starring | Brandon Baker Brian Doyle-Murray (voice) Eartha Kitt (voice) Clancy Brown (voice) Peri Gilpin (voice) Sherman Howard (voice) |
Narrated by | Fred Savage |
Music by | Robert Folk |
Cinematography | Ronn Schmidt |
Edited by | Alan Baumgarten |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Buena Vista Home Entertainment |
Release date | September 29, 1998 |
77 minutes | |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story is a 1998 live-action direct-to-video film directed by Nick Marck, produced by Mark H. Orvitz and written by José Rivera and Jim Herzfeld. It is the third film adaptation by The Walt Disney Company of the Mowgli stories from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. It stars Brandon Baker, and features the voices of Brian Doyle-Murray, Eartha Kitt, Clancy Brown, Peri Gilpin, and Sherman Howard.
The film chronicles the life of a boy named Mowgli (Baker) from the time he lived with humans as an infant to the time when he was raised by wild animals and rediscovered humans again as a teenager. It was distributed by Walt Disney Pictures on September 29, 1998.
- 2Cast
Plot[edit]
In the jungle of India, a group of villagers are sightseeing. Later that night, Shere Khan the tiger (Sherman Howard), and his sidekick Tabaqui the hyena (Stephen Tobolowsky) attack the villagers. A young boy named Mowgli (Brandon Baker) runs off in search of his parents, only to get lost. He is eventually taken into a wolf pack by wolf parents, Akela (Clancy Brown) and Raksha (Peri Gilpin).
Mowgli befriends Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, Chil the vulture, and Hathi the elephant. One day, Hathi takes Mowgli for a ride on his back in order to give him a tour of the jungle. Mowgli learns that man poses a danger to the jungle and the animals after seeing part of the jungle destroyed by fire.
During a pack meeting, Mowgli and his wolf sister, Little Raksha (both of whom are now older) are chosen to become hunters for the pack, much to the dismay of the wolf bullies. Shere Khan (now wanting revenge after being shot by a human) confronts the wolf pack and demands they hand over Mowgli. Raksha and Akela refuse, saying that Mowgli is their son. Bagheera and Baloo arrive and swear to protect Mowgli from Shere Khan. Shere Khan then assures Mowgli that one day, he will get his revenge, when the pack, Bagheera, or Baloo won't be able to protect him.
Bagheera and Baloo attempt to teach Mowgli how to hunt, only resulting in failed attempts from Mowgli. Bagheera then makes Mowgli look into her eyes, a trick Shere Khan uses on his victims, believing it will prepare Mowgli, should he ever encounter Shere Khan alone. Mowgli learns the lesson and returns to the pack.
One night, the wolf bullies team up with Shere Khan to drive Mowgli out of the pack, all believing that man does not belong in a wolf pack. During a hunt, Akela assigns groups for the hunt. Mowgli is teamed with the wolf bullies. They cause him to ruin the hunt, making the pack go hungry. Upset, Mowgli decides to run away from the pack.
The next day, Mowgli runs off with some chimpanzees to Monkey Town, for they claim a 'surprise party'. Unbeknown to Mowgli, the chimps have set up a plan with Shere Khan. They trap him in a wooden house, thus making him vulnerable for Shere Khan. Chil flies off to tell Raksha. Raksha races to Monkey Town to rescue Mowgli.
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The chimps assure Shere Khan that Mowgli is trapped. Shere Khan proceeds to Monkey Town to kill Mowgli. At Monkey Town, Shere Khan is confronted by Raksha. Shere Khan attacks Raksha and kills her. Bagheera and Baloo rescue Mowgli and take him away from Monkey Town.
The next day, Hathi informs Mowgli that an incident has occurred involving Raksha. Hathi takes Mowgli back to the pack, where Raksha's lifeless corpse is laid out. Akela, Little Raksha and Mowgli mourn Raksha's death. Blaming himself, Mowgli tries to run away from the jungle. Little Raksha runs off to try and stop Mowgli.
Mowgli stumbles upon a village, seeing his own kind. Mowgli then hears Little Raksha's cries for help and returns to the jungle to aid her. He frees her from a bear trap. Little Raksha then reminds Mowgli that he took the 'Hunter's Oath' and shouldn't run away. Mowgli realizes that he must face Shere Khan. He decides not to face Shere Khan as a wolf, but as a man.
That night, Shere Khan falls for Mowgli's trap, a large circle made from vines. With Shere Khan in the circle, Mowgli sets the vines on fire using a match he found at the wooden house back at Monkey Town, trapping Shere Khan by surrounding him with flames. Mowgli then banishes Shere Khan from the jungle as Bagheera, Baloo, Little Raksha, Hathi and the wolf bullies look on. Shere Khan swears never to return to the jungle, so Mowgli allows him to leave. Mowgli is praised by everyone, including the wolf bullies, who admit that they were wrong about him. The role of leader of the pack is offered to Mowgli, but he turns it down and gives it to Little Raksha.
The next day, Bagheera and Baloo give Mowgli a book featuring jungle animals. He thanks them and then runs off.
Cast[edit]
- Brandon Baker as Mowgli the man cub
- Ryan Taylor as Young Mowgli
- Rajan Patel as Indian Soldier
Voices[edit]
- Brian Doyle-Murray as Baloo the bear
- Eartha Kitt as Bagheera the panther
- Clancy Brown as Akela the wolf (wolfdog)
- Peri Gilpin as Raksha
- Fred Savage as Narrator
- Marty Ingels as Hathi the elephant
- Sherman Howard as Shere Khan the tiger
- Stephen Tobolowsky as Tabaqui the hyena
- Kathy Najimy as Chil the vulture
- Dee Bradley Baker as Elephant, Bee, Mandrill, Turtle
- Nancy Cartwright as Wolf Pup, Doe, Macaw, Skunk, Chimp
- Ashley Peldon as Teenage Li'l Raksha
- Wallace Shawn as Tarzan Chimp
- Richard Kind as Chimp 1
- Catherine Lloyd Burns as Chimp 2
- Ken Campbell as Wolf 1
- Scott Menville as Wolf 2
- Quinton Flynn as Wolf 3, Bad Baboon
- Kay Kuter as Biranyi
- Katie Volding as Baby Li'l Raksha
- Isaac Lichter-Marck as Wolf Pup
- Myles Jeffrey as Wolf Pup
- Dee Dee Rescher as Turtle, Rhesus
- Harriet Harris as Turtle, Rhesus
- Patrick Egan as Water Buffalo, Wolf, Rhesus
- Frank Welker as Porcupine, Bad Baboon, Deer, Mandrill, Additional Voices
External links[edit]
- The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story on IMDb
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Jungle_Book:_Mowgli%27s_Story&oldid=923135370'
Mowgli | |
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The Jungle Book character | |
Mowgli by John Lockwood Kipling (father of Rudyard Kipling). An illustration from 'sex (1895) | |
First appearance | 'In the Rukh' (1893) |
Last appearance | 'The Spring Running' (1895) |
Created by | Rudyard Kipling |
Information | |
Nickname | Man-cub, Frog |
Species | Human |
Gender | Male |
Family | Unnamed parents † Raksha (foster mother) Father Wolf (foster father) Messua (foster mother) Nathoo (foster brother) † Unnamed wife Unnamed son |
Mowgli/ˈmaʊɡli/ is a fictionalcharacter and the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book stories. He is a nakedferal child from the Pench area in Seoni, India, who originally appeared in Kipling's short story 'In the Rukh' (collected in Many Inventions, 1893) and then went on to become the most prominent and memorable character in his collections The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book (1894–1895), which also featured stories about other characters.[1]
Name[edit]
In the stories, the name Mowgli is said to mean 'frog', describing his lack of fur. Kipling made up the name, and it 'does not mean 'frog' in any language that I know of.'[2]
Kipling stated that the first syllable of 'Mowgli' should rhyme with 'cow' (that is, /maʊ/)[3] as opposed to the expected English word 'mow' (/moʊ/).
Kipling's Mowgli stories[edit]
The Mowgli stories, including 'In the Rukh', were first collected in chronological order in one volume as The Works of Rudyard Kipling Volume VII: The Jungle Book (1907) (Volume VIII of this series contained the non-Mowgli stories from the Jungle Books), and subsequently in All the Mowgli Stories (1933).
'In the Rukh' describes how Gisborne, an English forest ranger in the Pench area in Seoni at the time of the British Raj, discovers a young man named Mowgli, who has extraordinary skills in hunting, tracking, and driving wild animals (with the help of his wolf brothers). He asks him to join the forestry service. Mueller, the head of the Department of Woods and Forests of India as well as Gisborne's boss, meets Mowgli, checks his elbows and knees, noting the callouses and scars, and figures Mowgli is not using magic or demons, having seen a similar case in 30 years of service. Muller also offers Mowgli to join the service, to which Mowgli agrees. Later, Gisborne learns the reason for Mowgli's almost superhuman talents; he was raised by a pack of wolves in the jungle (explaining the scars on his elbows and knees from going on all fours). Mowgli marries the daughter of Gisborne's butler, Abdul Gafur. By the end of the story, Mowgli has a son and is back to living with his wolf brothers.
Kipling then proceeded to write the stories of Mowgli's childhood in detail in The Jungle Book. Lost by his parents as a baby in the Indian jungle during a tiger attack, he is adopted by the Wolf Mother (Raksha) and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli (frog) because of his lack of fur and his refusal to sit still. Shere Khan the tiger demands that they give him the baby but the wolves refuse. Mowgli grows up with the pack, hunting with his brother wolves. In the pack, Mowgli learns he is able to stare down any wolf, and his unique ability to remove the painful thorns from the paws of his brothers is deeply appreciated as well.
Bagheera, the black panther, befriends Mowgli because both he and Mowgli have parallel childhood experiences; as Bagheera often mentions, he was 'raised in the King's cages at Oodeypore' from a cub, and thus knows the ways of man. Baloo the bear, teacher of wolves, has the thankless task of educating Mowgli in 'The Law of the Jungle'.
Shere Khan continues to regard Mowgli as fair game, but eventually Mowgli finds a weapon he can use against the tiger – fire. After driving off Shere Khan, Mowgli goes to a human village where he is adopted by Messua and her husband, whose own son Nathoo was also taken by a tiger. It is uncertain if Mowgli is actually the returned Nathoo, although it is stated in 'Tiger! Tiger!' that the tiger who carried off Messua's son was similar to the one that attacked Mowgli's parents. Messua would like to believe that her son has returned, however, she herself realises that this is unlikely.
While herding buffalo for the village, Mowgli learns that the tiger is still planning to kill him, so with the aid of two wolves, he traps Shere Khan in a ravine where the buffalo trample him. The tiger dies and Mowgli sets to skin him. After being cast out of the village after being accused of witchcraft, Mowgli returns to the jungle with Shere Khan's hide and reunites with his wolf family.
In later stories in The Jungle Book's sequel, The Second Jungle Book, Mowgli learns that the villagers are planning to kill Messua and her husband for harboring him. He rescues them and sends elephants, water buffaloes, and other animals to trample the village and its fields to the ground. Later, finds and then discards an ancient treasure ('The King's Ankus') not realising it is so valuable that men would kill to own it. With the aid of Kaa the python, he leads the wolves in a war against the Dhole ('Red Dog').
Finally, Mowgli stumbles across the village where his adopted human mother (Messua) is now living, which forces him to come to terms with his humanity and decide whether to rejoin his fellow humans in 'The Spring Running'.
Play adaptations[edit]
Rudyard Kipling adapted the Mowgli stories for The Jungle Play in 1899, but the play was never produced on stage. The manuscript was lost for almost a century. It was finally published in book form in 2000.[4]
Influences upon other works[edit]
Only six years after the first publication of The Jungle Book, E. Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods (1899) included a passage in which some children act out a scene from the book.[1]:204
Mowgli has been cited as a major influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs who created and developed the character Tarzan. Mowgli was also an influence for a number of other 'wild boy' characters.
Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson used the Mowgli stories as the basis for their humorous 1957 science fiction short story 'Full Pack (Hokas Wild)'. This is one of a series featuring a teddy bear-like race called Hokas who enjoy human literature but cannot quite grasp the distinction between fact and fiction. In this story, a group of Hokas get hold of a copy of The Jungle Book and begin to act it out, enlisting the help of a human boy to play Mowgli. The boy's mother, who is a little bemused to see teddy bears trying to act like wolves, tags along to try to keep him (and the Hokas) out of trouble. The situation is complicated by the arrival of three alien diplomats who just happen to resemble a monkey, a tiger and a snake. This story appears in the collection Hokas Pokas! (1998) (ISBN0-671-57858-8), and is also available online.
Mowgli stories by other writers[edit]
The Third Jungle Book (1992) by Pamela Jekel (ISBN1-879373-22-X) is a collection of new Mowgli stories in a fairly accurate pastiche of Kipling's style.
Hunting Mowgli (2001) by Maxim Antinori (ISBN1-931319-49-9) is a very short novel which describes a fateful meeting between Mowgli and a human hunter.
The Jungle Book: Last of the Species (2013) by Mark L Miller (ISBN9781939683021) is a series of comic books that tells the story of a female Mowgli who unintentionally started a war between animal tribes after killing Shere Khan to avenge the fallen members of the wolf tribe.
Movies, television and radio[edit]
- The 1942 film version starred Sabu as Mowgli.
- Disney's 1967 animated musical film version, where he is voiced by Bruce Reitherman, son of the film's director Wolfgang Reitherman, and its sequel, The Jungle Book 2 (2003), in which Mowgli is voiced by Haley Joel Osment.
Heroes of the Soviet animation film on a postal stamp of Russia
- Around the same time – from 1967 to 1971 – five Russian short animated films were made by Soyuzmultfilm, collectively known as Adventures of Mowgli.
- Of all the various adaptations, Chuck Jones's 1977 animated TV short Mowgli's Brothers, adapting the first story in The Jungle Book, may be the one that adheres most closely to the original plot and dialogue.[citation needed]
- There has also been a Japaneseanimated TV seriesJungle Book Shonen Mowgli (where Mowgli is voiced by Urara Takano in the Japanese and Julian Bailey in the English Dub) based on the Mowgli series and a US live-action series, Mowgli: The New Adventures of the Jungle Book (where Mowgli is portrayed by Sean Price McConnell).
- There was also a BBC radio adaptation in 1994, starring actress Nisha K. Nayar as Mowgli, Freddie Jones as Baloo and Eartha Kitt as Kaa. It originally aired on BBC Radio 5 (before it became BBC Radio 5 Live and dropped its children's programming). Subsequently, it has been released on audio cassette and has been re-run a number of times on digital radio channel BBC 7 (now BBC Radio 4 Extra).
- Classics Illustrated #83 (1951) contains an adaptation of three Mowgli stories.
- Between 1953 and 1955 Dell Comics featured adaptations of six Mowgli stories in three issues (#487,[5] #582[6] and #620[7]).
- Some issues of Marvel Fanfare feature adaptations of the Mowgli stories by Gil Kane. These were later collected as an omnibus volume.
- Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book which was released by The Walt Disney Company in 1994.
- P. Craig Russell's Jungle Book Stories (1997) collects three stories, actually adapted from The Second Jungle Book, which originally appeared between 1985 and 1996.
- A 2016 live action remake of Disney's animated version of The Jungle Book directed by Jon Favreau which starred newcomer Neel Sethi as Mowgli.
- A 2018 live action adaptation titled Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, directed by Andy Serkis, which starred Rohan Chand as Mowgli.[8]
Actors who played the character[edit]
Mowgli has been played by many male actors. In the 1942 film adaptation, Mowgli was played by Sabu Dastagir. In the 1994 film adaptation, he was played by Sean Naegeli as a child, and later throughout the film he was played by Jason Scott Lee. In The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo, he was played by Jamie Williams. In The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story, he was played by Brandon Baker. Mowgli was played by Neel Sethi in the Disneylive-action reimagination, which was released in 3D in April 2016. Mowgli was played by Rohan Chand in the Netflix film Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, which was released on November 29, 2018.[9][8][10]
References[edit]
- ^ abSale, Roger (1978). 'Kipling's Boy's'. Fairy Tales and After: from Snow White to E.B. White. Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN0-674-29157-3.
- ^'Kipling's list of names'. www.kiplingsociety.co.uk. 30 March 2007. Retrieved 2019-02-23.
- ^Kipling's list of names in the stories
- ^The Jungle Play: UK paperback edition: ISBN0-14-118292-X
- ^'Image: jbcomic1-big.jpg, (722 × 1014 px)'. p-synd.com. Retrieved 2015-09-04.
- ^'Image: jbcomic2-big.jpg, (785 × 1110 px)'. p-synd.com. Retrieved 2015-09-04.
- ^'Image: jbcomic3-big.jpg, (783 × 1100 px)'. p-synd.com. Retrieved 2015-09-04.
- ^ abKit, Borys (20 August 2014). 'Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett Join 'Jungle Book: Origins''. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 14 September 2014.
- ^Sinha-Roy, Piya (November 8, 2018). 'Watch Netflix's new trailer for Andy Serkis' dark twist on The Jungle Book tale, Mowgli'. Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved November 8, 2018.
- ^Ford, Rebecca (6 April 2016). 'Warner Bros. Pushes 'Jungle Book' to 2018, 'Wonder Woman' Gets New Date'. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mowgli. |
- In the Rukh: Mowgli's first appearance from Kipling's Many Inventions
- The Jungle Book Collection and Wiki: a website demonstrating the variety of merchandise related to the book and film versions of The Jungle Books, now accompanied by a Wiki on the Jungle Books and related subjects
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