In this image released by Disney, Mowgli, portrayed by Neel Sethi, left, and Gray, voiced by Brighton Rose, appear in a scene from, “The Jungle Book.” (Disney via AP)‘The Jungle Book’
› Rating: PG for some sequences of scary action and peril.› Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
You can practically feel the beating heart of the jungle in Jon Favreau’s stunning adaptation of “The Jungle Book,” which is easily the most visually dazzling movie to hit theaters this year. Like “Avatar” before it, this CG and live-action interpretation of Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale of the boy raised by wolves feels like a momentous occasion in the technical advancements of big-budget cinema.
From the thrill of a distant waterfall to the terror of a mudslide or stampeding buffalo, Favreau and his visual-effects maestros have created artificial living things that truly look and feel real.
Even the animals’ ability to communicate in English seems as natural as their breathing and emoting. They have not been sanitized to be cute or less threatening either – even the tender mama wolf Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o).
They still look like wild animals and, for the most part, act like wild animals, too. At first, this actually makes their close interactions with the human boy Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi) even more disarming. Eventually your nerves calm and you submit to the magic of this world.