Befitting his career as an expert shaper of familiar material, he’s thoroughly domesticated the tale, creating a sweet, funny film in which peace and goodness defeat violence and cruelty, and characters succeed not by destroying others but by becoming fully themselves. But as far as pure and explicit racism goes, Kipling’s novel scores lower than Disney’s 1967 movie, which introduced a great ape called King Louie (after Louie Armstrong) who sang minstrel songs about his desire to get civilized.Įnter Jon Favreau. You might furrow your brow at the way the Indian villagers succumb to supernatural babble and suspicion.
You might wince at the subtext of these characters’ dominance-for Kipling, whites were born rulers as surely as tigers were born predators-or point out the author’s lack of pity for the weak. He loved the panther Bagheera with his liquid menace (“his jaws shut with a snap, for he did not believe in being humble”), the terrifying python Kaa, and most of all Mowgli, who commands fire and possesses a gaze the beasts cannot meet without flinching. Might makes right mesmerized Kipling the more ruthless the subjugation, the better.
Well, Kipling was certainly a racist fuck-look no further than his novel Kim for a portrait of brave British spies and slavish, dark-skinned Buddhists-but The Jungle Book, which Kipling wrote out of a Vermont cabin in 1894, doesn’t showcase his bigotry so much as his uncritical reverence for power.
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