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19 March 2024

Welcome to Mowgli's world: Jungle Book like you have never seen

Disney's live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories has made $252.1 million since opening last month. (Screen grab)

Published
By Staff

While watching 'The Jungle Book' in the theatre, you feel the world around you transform - walking deep into the jungle, climbing the giant tree, falling off a dry brunch, clinging on to a wild buffalo and braving Sher Khan.

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Little did you know that there were no exteriors shot for the entire film (forget a real jungle) and that every frame was filmed on a soundstage building.

The movie that had audiences swept up by for the last couple of hours was shot not in the jungles of India, but downtown Los Angeles.

And now, Disney has released a video and some behind-the-scenes images that shed some light on just how much work went into creating the lush world.

The new video released by Disney is fascinating. To have just one live-action character in the whole film (everything and everyone else was computer-generated), and to make the world seem real and lived in was pure movie magic.

Even though the supporting cast of talking animals were obviously created in a computer, the world on display in Jon Favreau's film feels so real and so detailed that it’s often hard to believe that almost every element on the screen was generated by a large team of geniuses after the fact.

No matter your opinion the film as a whole, the visual effects are truly next generation technology.

While the video should give you renewed respect for director Jon Favreau and the VFX wizards with whom he collaborated, it should also help you appreciate Neet Sethi’s (Mowgli) performance a little more.

As the sole element of the film that wasn't created out of pixels, he had to craft a performance while literally interacting with nothing.

Young Sethi is sprinting on a treadmill, hugging hilariously fake looking animals in front of blue screens, and interacting with people covered head-to-toe in blue as they use colorful sock puppets to simulate animal characters who will be added later.

The actual in-camera footage looks bizarre but it is a movie that has set really high benchmarks for filmmakers.

'The Jungle Book' pulverized a trio of box office lightweights, racking up $42.4 million to lead ticket sales for the third consecutive weekend.

Disney's live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories has made $252.1 million since opening last month. It should have no trouble becoming the fourth film this year to cross $300 million domestically, joining the likes of 'Deadpool,' 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice' and 'Zootopia.'