When you see the outtakes and bloopers at the end of a movie I have always felt that it makes the film that much more enjoyable. But do you know how they get there? Did you know there’s a process? I’d like to thank Disney for bringing me out on an all expense paid trip to cover this event for you and bring you these exclusive behind the scenes look! Let’s look at what goes on behind the scenes of the making of the Jungle Book.
I’d like to introduce you to Brigham Taylor the producer and Rob Legato (visual effects supervisor) the creative geniuses behind Jon Favreau’s vision for the Jungle Book!
This is such an interesting narrative on how they bring a film like the Jungle Book to life. Stay with it and enjoy hearing their vision. Introducing Brigham Taylor (Producer) and Rob Legato (Visual Effects Supervisor).
So my first question that wasn’t mentioned in the bonus features is how long does that whole process — like from start to finish, what was the actual time?
BRIGHAM: Tell me if you agree with this Rob. There’s a period of time where you’re just working on story before you’re really engaging. So from the time you’re really starting to prep the film to about the time we first met and started talking, you’re talking about a year of, you know, of sort of pre-production and another year to finish it.
ROB: Yeah it was very short to actually produce the film from the moment we started shooting until the moment we released it, you know, up till now. It was impossible to do a film that has this many shots in it, in 3-D, all computer generated. It was a miracle. And so it was about 2-1/2 years when I originally came on to start talking about it. We had built up and make sort of in house, you know, mechanisms to do this movie, the art department and the virtual art department and all the various things. But, 2-1/2 years I think is a full-on production but I don’t know what happened prior to that.
BRIGHAM: Yeah. Just story development that was, like I said, about six to eight months.
BRIGHAM: But for me, it wasn’t unique to see the better part of the year in post-production to finish all these shots. Whether you’re working on a complex movie like “Pirates” or “Narnia” or something like that, but for me it was the nearly a year spent making all of the many specific decisions to get to the point of photography because once you saw that kid on the stage, everything had to have already been worked out in terms of the scale of each creature, the scale of the jungle, you had to know exactly where you were pointing, what you were looking at. You even had to have rough drafts of it. You could see on the screen at the time. So I’ve never been really sure they had to have that many decisions already made, very specifically before you even shoot.
ROB: Well part of the drill was also to create something that when you go on stage you have great authority. You know exactly what it’s going to look like or what it wants to look like and to us, even though when you see all the previews and things like that you are actually seeing sort of a cartoon version. It may be hard to picture but when we’re seeing it, we’re seeing the finished shot so that’s the template for the finished shot. So, we are looking through it. I’ve worked on another film before where I was showing somebody a test, what it ultimately would look like, and they were only judging it for what it was and so oh my God, it looks awful. That’s horrible, why do you like that? It’s like well it’s going to look good.
But in our heads we’re not really seeing that. We’re seeing the finished piece. We’re seeing what the art direction is going to look like, seeing what the lighting is going to look like but you have to kind of bed that in something firm so when you walk on it, because the blue screen stage is really difficult to come up with ideas because there’s nothing there. It’s almost stupefying. So, you need to have in your head a very clear idea so you can actually direct the shot and even judge it if it’s working out.
Q: So about how many people would you say you had on your production team?
BRIGHAM Well, different amounts at different times but when you were fully staffed, when everyone was in full swing we had so many other people around because you are talking about the massive teams and visual effects. The crew when we were actually shooting on set was modest in that, a couple hundred, but you know, you’re talking over 800 people.
ROB: There were probably 1,000, maybe 2,000 people, all in all, if we could count all the musicians and all the musicians in New Orleans and if you count everybody that was actually on the film at one point or another, it’s probably close to 2,000 people, a lot, precisely it’s a lot of people.
Q: I have a two part question. What would you say was your favorite part about creating this and then 50 years from now, what do you want people to remember most about this version of the film?
BRIGHAM: Uh, your favorite part?
It reminds you of films that you loved when you were growing up
ROB: Boy there’s a lot of favorite parts. That’s a hard question. I think the first time — let me answer the second question. For me, doing this for a long time, having worked on these various films, what I always wanted to be able to do is to say okay now that we have all this ability to do anything we want to do, let’s do something very specific in the tradition of why I was interested in the movie making in the first place.
I think in everyone’s mind, you have a backlog of every movie starting from “Casablanca” on that impressed you in some way or saw a thing, a sensation and all that stuff, and so you want to make a movie that uses all this technology that doesn’t remind you of CG oriented movies, or superhero movies. It reminds you of films that you loved when you were growing up and so you almost do so much technology to make it disappear into the background and what I would like for the audience to respond to and then the future audience to respond to is that this is starting to make a demarcation where the digital portion is no longer a dirty word, CGO, they did it and CG is a dirty word.
It’s the same artifice of moviemaking from the beginning. There were fake walls. There were fake sets, people wearing costumes, people wearing makeup. They are not saying their own words. They are saying words that are written for them but we divorced ourselves from all that when we get into the movie and so CG should be the same thing and so what I’d like for people to remember is that that’s what really occurred. That is the first time you forgot you were watching something that could have been done on a computer and it hearkens back because it continually reminds you of live action shots you’ve seen so you must be watching a live action movie.
It (the Jungle Book movie) continually reminds you of live action shots you’ve seen so you must be watching a live action movie when in reality it’s CGI. Rob L. The Jungle Book
And for me, we were making a live action movie. We were not making an animated film, we didn’t want to look like an animated film like that. I guess the first time I think I got a big thrill from it was for some reason of all the characters. There is something about Idris Elba playing that character and the melding of his voice, his performance, the character he was playing, the way it was animated, that represented his emotion and then the way it was photographed and the sole total of the composite of that went wow, that’s a real character.
That’s not a guy voicing a cartoon. That’s a real specific thing. And everybody else is great but for some reason he just like clicked it up a notch. He went to a level 11 and made that.
There is something about Idris Elba playing that character and the melding of his voice, his performance, the character he was playing, the way it was animated, that represented his emotion and then the way it was photographed and the sole total of the composite of that went wow, that’s a real character. Rob L. the Jungle Book
BRIGHAM: “Spinal Tap” memories. For me, my favorite part was the opportunity to sit in a room early on with a storyteller like Jon and our writer Justin, just to be involved in the conversation about what the film was going to be. We knew what this film was going to be. We knew what the material was but there were still a lot of decisions that were very unique to this movie, so to be involved in that early on is really exhilarating when it’s all sort of blue sky. And, secondarily to that I would say that, you know, by the time it was done to be able to sit and watch the film with your kids, and when you have a film that does get the desired reaction from them. A lot of films you work on don’t get that reaction unfortunately, but this one did.
Experiencing it with my kids and having the glee of experiencing these characters that they are really engaged with, which is always the hope, but also the wonderment of not being sure how it even happened. So that was really exhilarating. And to answer your second part of the question. The takeaway is that people look back at both as a point of demarcation about saying that was a kind of landmark, cinematic moment for me but more importantly I had an emotional response to the movie.
Q: At one point, Jon Favreau says they want you to feel overwhelmed and not even realizing the things that are going on behind the scenes, one of the biggest parts for me was the adding of puppetry, can you discuss that a little bit about how, like you said, the variety of tennis balls and actually using puppeteers to add to the movie.
ROB: Yeah, well, part of the decision, too, was the fact that it was Neel, this is the very first film he has ever been in and how do you elicit a response from somebody and keep it fresh take after take after take? So, that’s why I thought, I even mentioned in there, I thought it was a brilliant idea that you have somebody that will capture his imagination with small little things, you just take, put little knuckles, eyeballs on them, and they did that and they would, you know, adlib a couple of things that were not in the movie but his reaction would be of that is in the movie.
So that part, for experienced actors, they are used to. This happens all the time, people ask about well, you know, if you’re in a blue screen stage how many actors know what you’re doing? It’s like well they never see that. They are seeing this. They are seeing everybody on their iPhones, the crew kind of bored and they are talking to an ex on C-SPAN and so they are really used to the artifice of moviemaking. They are not even looking at the other actor, even if they are doing it off-screen, they are looking just slightly off so the camera looks, makes it look like they are looking at it but they are not.
So, they are used to all that stuff, so you could put in a TV screen, you could put in some other thing that would be the other actor or, or what the scene looks like, but for a kid who was never an actor before, that is probably pretty daunting and so Jon being an actor, the reason why he was good at this sort of thing, of interpreting that, is to give him something that could change and then we’ve taken the line organic because ultimately at the end of the day it was going to be that way, for the audience to see. And so he needs to experience it to make you believe that he’s seeing the animals speaking to him and, and it’s a sort of an unrehearsed speech. He reacts to what they say and organically, so I think that that decision was, you know, one of the best ones for this kid.
On Neel having the puppets to help him as a new actor: He reacts to what they say and he reacts organically. So I think that decision was one of the best ones for this kid.
BRIGHAM: Yeah that was one of the most discussed things cause the puppeteers also brought a human element performance onstage.When we needed to build some, not every shot required a scale puppet but sometimes we did, whether it was to cast a shadow or to get the right byline and also to get a performer in there and so we turned to the Henson company to build those. They didn’t have much time because we figured this out, we need that and they turned it around quickly and they also turned us onto some of these fun performers with Artie and Allen and Shaun. These guys were very used to working that way but also were just great at feeding these lines and giving the performances so that was vital, something that Jon paid a lot of attention to because he knew how important Neel’s performance was.
ROB: And they became family, too, because it’s like a family of troop players so he became the big kid’s lead stand-in. He became, you know, all the rest of the characters and so they were used to, were very comfortable I think for Neel to suspend his disbelief. I mean, and he saw everything we were doing. One of the great things about him, motion-captured him, put him in a sort of cartoony version of the film and so we have at least the sense of what the scene was going to be about, who he was looking at, why they were saying what they’re saying and then so when he got into it, he at least knew. He could see through it, like a real actor does, can see through to, you know, see him looking at the crew while he’s talking, um.
And, and that he had a performer that would change it up and alter him and surprise him and stuff like that, so does that answer?
Q: It seems like a very difficult process to go through, what was the most daunting scene and did you have any difficulties with maybe one particular scene that you really had to work through?
BRIGHAM: Well, yeah, I don’t know if I’ll have the same answer here but, one was much discussed in this piece which was saying goodbye to the mother because of the interactivity and also because of the level of performance, again, we had Neel in his first film, having done no acting prior, and it was a heavy emotional scene. It was also one of the most demanding technical scenes. And so, that was one that had a lot of discussion early on. I feel like we could talk about that scene for a year, both in terms of how we’re going to accomplish it.
But then also to have performers from the day and there were shots of Sara Arrington, another one of our off-screen sort of performers who was really key to just being there in the moment for Neel and giving the emotion of the mother in that moment and then I also look at the, the stampede in terms of you saw that little muddy trench that we built, which was all we had for that scene you know? Neel didn’t particularly love — he’ll be the first to admit he didn’t love being muddy.
So it was a challenge for him physically but then also just us running all those stuntmen up and back, up and back, the technical lighting we had to generate there, sending our cameraman, Bill was in there, just mud up to his gills for days. That was kind of a challenge.
ROB: Yeah, for me it’s a slightly different challenge cause I’m sort of used to doing all that stuff. It’s like I was not as daunted by it cause I’ve done things and I knew the technology was at a certain point we had really spectacular people doing it. I was not as nervous about the mechanical stuff.
So there’s the peace rock scene where there’s so many animals and so many different things and had a look like and felt like the way it feels in the movie. You’re starting with a blank page and what you really want is, you and your shooting specificity, why am I looking there? What am I seeing when I’m seeing there? What are we going to put there eventually to justify why we were looking over here? And all those things, there were so many and so many things out of the animator that, that without having a firm foundation, that’s why it’s sort of the technology of doing what we’re doing so you can at least see something to react to cause I’m a visual person and I needed to have something and it determines other things.
Well, if there are a lot more animals in the scene and the shot is slightly wider, I’m doing a camera move. I’m doing something that if it were real I would do but nothing is real. Nothing is really there. We have to invent it all as we are shooting it and, and so to me those are the harder scenes to do. The other ones, you know, since I’m used to doing a lot of visual effects sort of stuff and have to see not what’s there but what’s going to be there, but I have to really know in my head what it is and that was like something that we all didn’t have in our head and we kind of working on.
But nothing is real. Nothing is really there. We have to invent it all as we are shooting it.Those are the harder scenes to do. Rob Legato The Jungle Book
BRIGHAM: There’s a scene where Mowgli is first seeing all the animals at the watering hole. We probably have more versions of that than any other scene. It was mostly done in one take. Although we wound up cutting it up but yeah, we probably ran more versions of that over the course of two years than any other.
ROB: Yeah, it was the one that you just do how many and then when you put them in even in a crew phase they are just sliding on the ground so they don’t really quite look quite right. It’s a little harder to picture that one. The reason of it was straightforward but hard. Everything was hard. So, there was no easy shot. Everything was difficult but that was about it. That was the hardest I think for me. The rest of it I think was fairly straightforward.
BRIGHAM: But not easy.
ROB: But not easy.
Q: Along those lines, it’s such an innovative film and you’ve really pushed the boundaries, is there anything you weren’t able to do or had to compromise on that you wish you might have been able to or looking forward into films in the future that you would like to do?
ROB: Well, for me, I mean it’s all based on individual’s personality what they like, what they don’t like. I’m not a big superhero movie fan. Knocking down a zillion buildings and all that stuff, it doesn’t really do anything for me and any kind of emotional audience would respect and be enjoying the cinema of it. There are some shots I would like to have been or have more sort of cinematic quality, like if you were really there and you had Titan Crane and you would do this kind of sweeping move and all that.
We kind of tamed that down quite a bit because at some point when you have something that nothing is real, you add this other bit of flourish to it that you really would do on a big set like a David Lee movie, you kind of shy away from because you are adding, as Nora Ephron said, you are putting a hat on a hat. You already have something and now you’re trying to top it and it kind of gives itself away. Now that we are able to achieve what we are able to achieve, then you can stretch the art form a little more to be really what you would do if you had 1,000 extras at your disposal for a shot.
And also then, you know, part and parcel to that is the restraint that even if you see a David Lee movie, if you have the scene where there are 1,000 or 2,000 people, they don’t really have that for that long a time and cinematically they set it up so that’s the payoff shot and then you move off and just like music there is a melody to it, and in modern superhero movies, every movie, every shot is the big David Lee shot and there’s no valley to it and so it doesn’t — there’s no contrast to it so when you look at it you just get kind of numb, divine fact, you know, just tell you don’t print it.
We kind of tamed that down quite a bit because at some point when you have something that nothing is real, you add this other bit of flourish to it that you really would do on a big set like a David Lean movie, you kind of shy away from because you are, as Nora Ephron said, you are putting a hat on a hat. You already have something and now you’re trying to top it and it kind of gives itself away. Now that we are able to achieve what we are able to achieve, then you can stretch the art form a little more to be really what you would do if you had 1,000 extras at your disposal for a shot.
But I’ll watch a movie that has a lot of action. I won’t mention the filmmaker, but it has too much action, like those sorts of movies, and I literally start to fall asleep. It, just, there’s so much input I don’t know where to look anymore so I stop looking and I literally will, it will be — just that’s what I need when I go to sleep at night is I’ll put on a, a big action movie where buildings are blown up and then I’ll just nod off.
BRIGHAM: The cool thing is there isn’t anything that we wanted to do that we couldn’t do technically. There was discussion about well I’d rather not do something if we can’t do it well, and it turns out that everything, you know, the only restrictions were self-imposed. We didn’t want the film to be too long. We were trying to be very strict about the duration, in terms of the overall experience but there was nothing to my recollection that we set out to do that we didn’t accomplish and that was really neat.
ROB: One of the harder things to do was the very end of the movie which was the book. We came up with that concept in January or Jon came up with the concept in January and before April we were finished with it but that was really challenging to produce that kind of caliber of work in that short a time without all this —
BRIGHAM: All the animation that came out of the book.
ROB: Well again, the concept of it, because it’s all loose until it all kind of comes together and then when it comes together we are releasing the movie, so —
Q: In putting together the bonus content for the home release, which behind the scene tidbits were you most excited to share with the audiences?
BRIGHAM: For me, just as a movie fan, I like hearing about little inspirations and tidbits that you wouldn’t have necessarily understood and this isn’t just one piece. It’s sprinkled throughout the pieces, like when Jon mentions how we were looking at the piece for Bambi and in terms of the inspiration for the first move and then there are six or seven of those moments. I find it interesting. I find it all engrossing and I worked on it. I like having digested in 30 minutes what took 2-2-1/2 years and looking at it that way, but I love hearing about the sort of behind the scenes creation inspirations in terms of why stuff wound up on the screen the way it did.
ROB: And I think for me, I like, again I need something in the back of my head to produce something, is the idea of the homage to Disney. The very opening piece which was there is a very slick animated CGI opening to all Disney movies now and they take advantage of everything. There is something very charming about the brilliant idea that they had with the multiplane camera and all that, so how do we subtly create a homage that makes you feel comfortable, like you’re watching an old Disney film.
And then we magically transfer you from that into our modern technology of being able to play it without hitting you over the head with it so it was to come up something we found, a Disney animator to do all the fireworks and all the stuff, and I had my son shoot it in the technicolor way, just the way they did it back in the day and we recreated it on the computer enough with the multiplane camera which was actually in one of the buildings here, the science and industry of it, the idea of it, that’s the kind of the paramount thing is the creative idea.
And then in the process of doing it, even as a filmmaker you’re subtly reminded that you didn’t really come up with anything original. When you look at Snow White and you start doing research, well we’ll roam — essentially motion capture is roam scoping. It’s just an automatic way, roam scoping. Well, they did that back then to give Snow White the feeling of her dress moving and her moving around and everybody was how do they get such life like quality to it? It was top secret at the time. They filmed it and then the animators used that as a reference.
And it’s no different than what we do. We have different tools. We have more modern equipment. We can see it instantly. They would have to wait a day to do it. So, there’s something about that that we are standing on the shoulders of Walt Disney and his group of people who were trying to push the envelope creatively to give a more emotional experience to the audience and so the fact that we sprinkled that in. I always like, when I hear stuff like that, that I feel it but I don’t exactly know what it is, that there was an idea behind it.
It wasn’t just oh, that would be cool, cause that’s not good enough. That would be cool, cause that kind of diminishes over time, just like it’s a flavor of the month and you forget about it. But it’s something that resonates. It’s something that lives for a long time and you kind of have some deep-rooted psychology to it. That to me was fascinating. I love the history of movies. I love all that. It’s the reason why I got into it in the first place.
Q: I love that the in-home releases from Disney have gone beyond hilarious outtakes. How do you go about the process of picking what is going to make it as a bonus feature. Like do you see things during filming, you’re like oh we’ve got to remember to add this in?
BRIGHAM: The trick is you try to capture everything and seasoned filmmakers, like we had on this film, Jon included, brought in a crew very early on just because we felt this was going to be an interesting process and project so we were capturing stuff at every key point throughout so that we would have options and you kind of get it all. We have a great team at Disney that produces this stuff and so they come back and start to say — because they have fresh perspective in saying this was really fascinating.
This was fascinating and luckily we have material to support all of that so it’s a dialogue about we’ll give you everything and I think we’re a very user-friendly production and then Disney says wouldn’t it be great if we looked at this, that, and in this case, I think there was enough to talk about that they were able to produce a nice piece like this which was kind of going above and beyond because it’s a really fun visual narrative to making this movie. So, luckily we had just sort of grabbed everything. It’s hard to decide at the beginning of the process what is going to be interesting but you do know when you go to New Orleans and you have Chris and you have Bill and you have Jon, you know you’re going to cover that. But in this case, we tried to kind of cover everything from behind the scenes perspective.
ROB: Yeah and the behind the scenes team at Disney actually was the ones that just really knew, getting all this material and they were coming up just like an audience member, I didn’t know you did it that way and they were being enthusiastic about it and any time, I mean there’s always a regret when we do this stuff because you wish to document it after it worked but while you’re doing it you’re under tight pressure, you know, to get it done. You don’t know if it’s going to work or not. You don’t want to look like an idiot and so you don’t give it the, kind of the due where you really, let’s stage this almost for a camera so people kind of do it.
ROB: We never do that. We’re just like, “oh my God, we’re going to lose it in 10 minutes. Let’s get this shot and you’re done. It’s like oh that would have been cool to record.
BRIGHAM: But it contains cameras regionally around.
ROB: Yeah, everything we do has reference cameras so no matter what, you’re sort of, somebody’s got it somewhere. There are probably 1,000’s of minutes of material out there at least.
The Jungle Book trailer and movie info
Gosh I loved this movie when my son was 2. And I loved the version I just got on DVD! It will be out on BluRay on 8/30! So good!
Check out the Jungle Book trailer video!
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THE JUNGLE BOOK is out on DVD today and BluRay will be released on 8/30!
THE JUNGLE BOOK
Genre: Live-Action/Action-Adventure
Rating: TBD
U.S. Release Date: April 15, 2016
Cast: Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Scarlett Johansson, Giancarlo Esposito, Neel Sethi and Christopher Walken,
Director: Jon Favreau
Producers: Jon Favreau, Brigham Taylor
Screenplay by: Justin Marks
Directed by Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”), based on Rudyard Kipling’s timeless stories and inspired by Disney’s classic animated film, “The Jungle Book” is an all-new live-action epic adventure about Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi), a man-cub who’s been raised by a family of wolves. But Mowgli finds he is no longer welcome in the jungle when fearsome tiger Shere Khan (voice of Idris Elba), who bears the scars of Man, promises to eliminate what he sees as a threat. Urged to abandon the only home he’s ever known, Mowgli embarks on a captivating journey of self-discovery, guided by panther-turned-stern mentor Bagheera (voice of Ben Kingsley), and the free-spirited bear Baloo (voice of Bill Murray). Along the way, Mowgli encounters jungle creatures who don’t exactly have his best interests at heart, including Kaa (voice of Scarlett Johansson), a python whose seductive voice and gaze hypnotizes the man-cub, and the smooth-talking King Louie (voice of Christopher Walken), who tries to coerce Mowgli into giving up the secret to the elusive and deadly red flower: fire.
The all-star cast also includes Lupita Nyong’o as the voice of the fiercely protective mother wolf Raksha, and Giancarlo Esposito as the voice of wolf pack’s alpha male Akela. “The Jungle Book” seamlessly blends live-action with photorealistic CGI animals and environments, using up-to-the-minute technology and storytelling techniques to immerse audiences in an enchanting and lush world. The wild adventure swings into theaters in 3D on April 15, 2016.
“The Jungle Book” is an all-new live-action epic adventure about Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi), a man-cub raised in the jungle by a family of wolves, who embarks on a captivating journey of self-discovery when he’s forced to abandon the only home he’s ever known.
Notes:
- Neel Sethi, now 11, was selected from thousands of candidates following a worldwide search for the perfect man-cub.
- The all-star voice cast includes Oscar®-winners Ben Kingsley (“Learning to Drive,” “The Walk”), Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) and Christopher Walken (“The Deer Hunter”), as well as Bill Murray (“Lost in Translation”), Idris Elba (“Star Trek Beyond”), Scarlett Johansson (“Avengers: Age of Ultron”) and Giancarlo Esposito (“Breaking Bad’).
- Rudyard Kipling penned the collection of short stories, “The Jungle Book,” in the early 1890s from his home in Vermont.
- State-of-the-art technology is behind larger-than-life jungle creatures that join Neel Sethi’s Mowgli on screen in an all-new, immersive, jaw-dropping viewing experience. The film will be spectacular in 3D and IMAX 3D.
OFFICIAL BOILERPLATE:
Directed by Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”), based on Rudyard Kipling’s timeless stories and inspired by Disney’s classic animated film, “The Jungle Book” is an all-new live-action epic adventure about Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi), a man-cub who’s been raised by a family of wolves. But Mowgli finds he is no longer welcome in the jungle when fearsome tiger Shere Khan (voice of Idris Elba), who bears the scars of Man, promises to eliminate what he sees as a threat. Urged to abandon the only home he’s ever known, Mowgli embarks on a captivating journey of self-discovery, guided by panther-turned-stern mentor Bagheera (voice of Ben Kingsley), and the free-spirited bear Baloo (voice of Bill Murray). Along the way, Mowgli encounters jungle creatures who don’t exactly have his best interests at heart, including Kaa (voice of Scarlett Johansson), a python whose seductive voice and gaze hypnotizes the man-cub, and the smooth-talking King Louie (voice of Christopher Walken), who tries to coerce Mowgli into giving up the secret to the elusive and deadly red flower: fire. The all-star cast also includes Lupita Nyong’o as the voice of the fiercely protective mother wolf Raksha, and Giancarlo Esposito as the voice of wolf pack’s alpha male Akela. “The Jungle Book” seamlessly blends live-action with photorealistic CGI animals and environments, using up-to-the-minute technology and storytelling techniques to immerse audiences in an enchanting and lush world. The wild adventure swings into your home on BluRay now!
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