The Jungle Book [2016] (3 discs)

Random Trivia For This Title:

• The cast includes three Oscar winners: Sir Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o, and Christopher Walken; and one Oscar nominee: Bill Murray.
• Jon Favreau said that Rudyard Kipling's story was a major influence on the movie, but the movie would reflect changing times: "In Kipling's time, nature was something to be overcome. Now nature is something to be protected."
• ^[?] Jamie Dornan was originally cast as Hathi. In the final movie however, he and the other elephants do not have any dialogue, nor are referred to by name.
• Kaa is majorly based on The Jungle Book (1967)'s incarnation (a predator who tries to eat Mowgli), but her hypnotic trance where she can see into time and learn a person's history comes from the original novel, where Kaa was a more neutral and helpful character.
• Right before he meets King Louie, Mowgli finds a cowbell in the monkey palace and proceeds to pick it up and shake it, causing Louie to appear. King Louie was played by Christopher Walken, who once famously stated on a [Saturday Night Live (1975)] sketch in 2000, "I have a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!"
• The "Jungle Book" storybook seen in the closing credits is the original book seen in The Jungle Book (1967)'s opening credits. It was brought out at the request of Director Jon Favreau to close the movie, which bookends the 1967 movie. As Faverau explained, "At the end of the movie, we found the book from the original Jungle Book in the (Disney) archives, and so that book that opens at the beginning of (the 1967) Jungle Book, I noticed never closes at the end of Jungle Book. Here we take the same book, the same blue velvet background and we close the book as though to, I think, pay homage to, and maybe feel like we're completing, that chapter."
• This is the first time that Kaa the snake is portrayed as a female, rather than a male. Jon Favreau said the change was a deliberate one, as he felt there were too many male characters in The Jungle Book (1967).
• Lyricist Richard M. Sherman, who wrote songs for The Jungle Book (1967), composed a new verse for "Wanna Be Like You" for Christopher Walken, where King Louie declares that he is a Gigantopithecus.
• The animal characters were motion-captured and performed live on-set by puppeteers from the Jim Henson Company. For the on-set performances, Jim Henson's Creature Shop built elaborate life-sized puppets to act alongside Mowgli, and serve as eye-lines.
• Sir Ben Kingsley described Bagheera as a military character: "He's probably a Colonel, he is instantly recognizable by the way he talks, how he acts, and what his ethical code is."
• Neel Sethi said that since he never actually worked with real animals on-set during filming, Director Jon Favreau would on occasion stand in for where the animals would be present, most notably as Shere Khan lunging out from the tall grass.
• All the locations in the movie are computer generated visual effects. The story may have been set primarily in India, but the movie was completely shot at Los Angeles Center Studios in Los Angeles, California.
• In The Jungle Book (1967), King Louie (who was created by Walt Disney and his people, and not by Rudyard Kipling) was an orangutan. In this movie, he's a Gigantopithecus, an animal that looks like an orangutan, but is an ancestor of gorillas whose range is believed to have included parts of India. This change in species was made to make the movie more fantastic, since it would be a better way to represent him as King of the Primates, and to show that orangutans are not native to India.
• One of the treasures in King Louie's temple is the Genie's lamp from Aladdin (1992).
• The CGI character Baloo is so large and furry, he took almost five hours of rendering time per frame.
• Earlier in this movie, when Shere Khan chases Mowgli into a valley, there was a stampede of water buffalo. In the original novel, Shere Khan was killed by a stampede of water buffalo (at Mowgli's direction) while sleeping.