The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation by Whitley David Mr

Author:Whitley, David, Mr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART 3

Tropical Environments

Chapter 5

The Jungle Book: Nature and the Politics of Identity

‘Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.’

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The Jungle Book, which was first released in 1967 a few months after Walt Disney had died, was the last animated feature over whose production Disney presided. It was, in some ways, a significant departure from the earlier animations. Although, like many earlier films, it was based on a classic text within the canon of children’s literature, the world that Kipling had created in his jungle stories was not, like other classic texts, either the ‘Old Europe’ of the nineteenth-century realist tradition, or the alternative world of fantasy and fairy tale that had provided so much of the material for Disney films to date. Kipling’s child-orientated narratives certainly offered immersion in a very different world to that experienced by young people in mid–twentieth-century western culture but, despite the sometimes archaic, biblically intoned language, Kipling’s India was not the pure fantasy land of the Alice stories, or Wind in the Willows, or Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. Kipling’s jungle tales may have allowed animals to speak and borrowed from the conventions of traditional oral storytelling, but they were also tough edged, realistic in many ways, and, in their depictions of animal life, owed more to observations of natural history than many earlier sentimental nature stories. Kipling’s jungle stories were, moreover, steeped in the sensibility of the most aggrandized phase of the British Empire, displaying the manly virtues of assumed, dauntless superiority, whilst also expressing deep-seated anxiety about the nature and reach of an underlying order – or ‘law’ as Kipling termed it – that was alone capable of sustaining life in a bearable, morally apprehensible, form.

No wonder then that Disney, with his instinct for sentimental populism, was wary of the original narrative, which he urged his animators and scriptwriters neither to read too closely nor to emulate. Robin Allan has described Disney’s treatment of the Kipling story in The Jungle Book as being akin to taking a sausage, throwing away all the contents except the skin and ‘filling that skin with their own ideas very far away from the original substance’ (1999: 244). Like many of the early Disney classics, the film opens with an image of a leather bound volume with the title, The Jungle Book, embossed on its cover. Kipling’s name only appears on an inner leaf however, turned over so swiftly that it barely registers, and the chapter headings that follow bear no relation to Kipling’s narrative design, gesturing instead towards key divisions in the film’s own episodic structure.

The freedom that the film’s opening rhetoric claims from its literary antecedent suggests the possibility of a very different narrative space. Within Kipling’s story the names, both of animals and places, are signs that hold together a web of memories of past events, shaping influences, patterns of behaviour that distinguish different animal and human groups.

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