CGI, real boy complete ‘Jungle Book’ – Favreau reimagines the classic cartoon

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LOS ANGELES, Feb 23, (RTRS): Jon Favreau was just a small child when he saw the original “Jungle Book,” but the film made a deep impression. The actor-director still vividly recalls majestic elephants on the march, the “hypnotic eyes” of the python Kaa and the man cub Mowgli riding down the river on the belly of the good-times bear, Baloo.

“You are a kid, and the cement is still really wet. You are imprinting very deeply,” the filmmaker said of the images from Disney’s 1967 animated film, which he said filled his childhood dreams.

Those age-old connections became both the challenge and, eventually, the blessing for Favreau when, nearly a half century later, Disney asked him to direct a remake of the animated favorite. Favreau talked about the opportunities the film presented in a meeting last month with a small audience of industry colleagues and press, while screening portions of the film, which debuts April 15.

“You are serving many masters when you make a film like this,” Favreau told the gathering at the El Capitan Theater. “You are trying to honor the memory, the emotional memory of people who grew up with this stuff. But you are also trying to make a movie that appeals to the full audience … That is really what Disney set out to do.”

Favreau, 49, said when Disney first asked him to reimagine the cartoon, he was less than enthused. He was not sure how to improve or expand on the original. But Disney had scored successes converting other animated classics to live action — like 2014’s “Maleficent” (from 1959’s “Sleeping Beauty”) and 2015’s “Cinderella” (from the 1950 original).

Rethink

Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn encouraged the director to rethink “Jungle Book” with the kind of computer-generated imagery that had enlivened films like “Life of Pi” and “Avatar”. “Alan said, let’s really embrace this new technology and see what we can do if we push it to its limit,” Favreau recalled.

The result is a film with only one live action character — the boy separated from his family in the jungle, played by the newcomer Neel Sethi. He is nurtured and menaced by a menagerie of animals created first with an array of technologies, from animation, to motion capture and finally to live-action shots of Sethi.

“If the kid was walking 12 feet, we built 12 feet of jungle,” Favreau said. “Each set was built for a single shot.”

A one-time “luddite” known to audiences for his acting turns and effects-light films like “Swingers” and “Chef”, Favreau described his growing affinity for filmmaking that extends beyond the practical. He said it began with his directorial work in “Elf”, grew substantially when he made “Iron Man” and reached an apogee with “Jungle Book”.

Favreau’s team included visual effects supervisor Rob Legato, acclaimed for helping conceive the images in “Avatar” and other films, including “The Wolf of Wall Street”. The special effects team creating the virtual world included the Moving Picture Company (MPC) and Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital.

Favreau showed the industry crowd early tests from “Jungle Book’s” pre-production — clips of animated birds, rippling water and other natural elements. He said the work persuaded him that CGI could now be used to reach far beyond the “hard surfaces” it had created in many action and superhero films, including his “Iron Man”. “I thought, ‘If we really set it up, could we do something that took it the level where you were watching something that was either photo-real or pleasantly elegant and beautiful and hypnotic?’”

The reaction of the audience at the El Capitan — with plenty of “oohs” and “ahhs” as Disney screened chase and fight scenes and Mowgli’s meeting with Baloo — seemed to suggested the answer was yes.

Though the director and Legato focused on the technical wizardry that created most of “Jungle Book’s” images, the director said he realized they needed something more than a realistic world. So they added mythical elements — outsized animals to create a sense of awe and heightened menace from the animated original. “We play with a tone that has a lot more jeopardy and where survival isn’t necessarily a given,” Favreau said.

Technology

But technology enhanced lighter elements, too, lending some of the stars an anthropomorphic twist. Motion capture and other technology helped introduce Bill Murray’s distinctive lifted eyebrow, for instance, to Baloo. “We tried to do it enough so you would see the soul of the actor,” Favreau said, “but not so much that it took you out of the reality of the movie.”

For all the high-flying computer-generated images, though, Favreau conceded that “Jungle Book” will rise and fall largely on whether audiences connect with the lone human on screen. The director said he had begun to worry during a prolonged casting effort about whether he would find the right boy.

He had seen 2,000 children from across the globe to play Mowgli when he finally met Sethi in the summer of 2014; the 10-year-old popped up in New York.

He appears in nearly every scene of “Jungle Book”. “When someone is on the screen that much of the movie, you don’t want someone you go tired of,” said Favreau. “You’re going to need someone who holds the screen and is interesting to watch.” He said Sethi had an impishness and physicality that reminded him of the animated Mowgli he first saw on the screen decades ago.

Also:

LOS ANGELES: The 2016 Tribeca Film Festival will open with the world premiere screening of “The First Monday in May”, Andrew Rossi’s documentary about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s attention-grabbing Costume Institute exhibition, “China: Through the Looking Glass.”

Magnolia Pictures’ “First Monday”, which will be the opening-night film of the Tribeca festival’s 15th edition, comes from the director of an earlier documentary about another New York institution, “Page One: Inside the New York Times.” “First Monday” centers on Met curator Andrew Bolton and the creation of the 2015 exhibit about Chinese-inspired Western fashion, as well as on the 2015 Met Gala, co-chaired by Anna Wintour.

“The First Monday in May” will kick off this year’s Tribeca Film Festival April 13. Produced by Fabiola Beracasa Beckman, Sylvana Ward Durrett, and Dawn Ostroff, in association with Relativity Studios, Conde Nast Entertainment, Mediaweaver Entertainment and Sarah Arison Productions, the movie will be released by Magnolia on April 15.

The opening night title marks the first film announced for Tribeca’s 2016 festival, with further slate details to be released beginning March 2. This year the fest runs April 13-24.

Co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, Tribeca has picked up a reputation over the years as an effective launchpad for documentary titles (including “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and “Bully”). The festival’s last two opening-night films were also documentaries: last year’s “Saturday Night Live” retrospective “Live from New York!” and 2014 opener “Time Is Illmatic”.

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