Iron Man director Jon Favreau is making a new adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling‘s classic children’s novel The Jungle Book, which wouldn’t necessarily be of note…until you see the trailer.
The Jungle Book, for those unaware, is a series of children’s short stories written in the late 1800s, and if you know about them at all you probably know them from the iconic 1967 Disney animated musical film. Or that Destiny trailer based around Giancarlo Esposito of Breaking Bad fame reading the story’s famous “Law of the Jungle” (and oddly enough, that trailer was directed by Jon Favreau, too). And when you watch the trailer above for Favreau‘s remake, it looks like a particularly interesting live action remake of The Jungle Book, one that strays a bit closer to the darker original Kipling tales and slightly more modern like the recent Cinderella.
Except part of that isn’t really true – the live action part. Because save for Mowgli, the lost child played by newcomer Neel Sethi, nothing in that trailer is real.
None of the jungle, none of the fields, none of the cliffs, none of the animals, none of the river at the end where you can see Baloo the bear floating and hear him whistling the 1967 musical’s famous “The Bare Necessities.” Except for the kid, this is entirely a CGI animated film. Yeah.
On top of that, this version of The Jungle Book boasts a star-studded cast – Scarlett Johansson as the snake Kaa is featured in the trailer, but as Mowgli‘s allies Baloo and Bagheera the panther we have Bill Murray and Ben Kingsley. We have Lupita Nyong’o and Giancarlo Esposito (again!) as Raksha and Akela, the wolves. And as villains, we have Christopher Walken as King Louie the orangutan and Idris Elba as the tiger Shere Khan.
This is suiting up to be one hell of a thing. Jon Favreau‘s The Jungle Book hits theaters April 15, 2016.
