Mowgli

If was a thread for this I can't find it,so making a new thread

Anyway this a straight adaptation of the books*,so I'm really forward to their interpretation,can't hurt to have two films based off the Jungle book

New pictures here

I don’t love the idea of Serkis mocapping as an Indian kid but damn if that isn’t some great CGI.

Very funny,he's actually mocapping baloo the bear

Eh, I’ve ignored a lot of racism coming in from Kipling to love the book, guess I could put up with a little brown face to get a faithful adaptation.

.....I’m kidding Hollywood, don’t actually start putting white people in brown face to play Indians.

Considering that I heard rumors that this movie will also feature Khaa in the original "Wise Old Mentor" role, it does seem like it is more promising adaptation faithfulness wise at least

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GpxCT36DxKg

First trailer for Mowgli. The mocapping is a little off putting, especially with Shere Khan, but it looks like they are trying to be more faithful to the source material so I might check it out.

edited 21st May '18 12:49:16 PM by 123tbones

Man, this is going to suffer so much from being released only a couple of years after The Jungle Book (2016). I know this film is aiming to be closer to the source material, but the comparisons are going to inevitable and overshadow what this film is trying to do. I mean, the visuals are almost identical, so it's going to come down to which version of the story one prefers. I'll keep my eye on this, but it's going to have an uphill fight to say the very least.

edited 21st May '18 1:23:40 PM by chasemaddigan

So I watched the trailer.but it didn't exactly grab me

The faces were kinda distracting, I think they stylised them to better differentiate it from the 2016 film but they veered straight into the Uncanny Valley.

It's weird that on one hand the movie goes for a more grungy, "realistic" Mowgli, as opposed to the clean one of the 2016 Jungle Book, yet the animals in this version look so... cartoony.

They didn't have the budget that the Disney version had,or it's deliberate choice as it's a fantasy film

Embedded version:

My first impression upon seeing Kaa from the trailer made me think she's undergoing Adaptational Villainy yet again, so unless this turns out to be a Bait-and-Switch, I'm already disappointed. Why can't there be an adaptation of The Jungle Book where Kaa is unambiguously good?

I don't mind the more stylized look of the animals, personally.

Kaa's a snake. She isn't going to LOOK like an unambiguous good guy. There's a reason we're so scared of them as a culture. That being said, all I saw of her is her saying Mowgli is something the jungle hasn't seen before. That doesn't have to be a bad guy. She could be his mentor. Knowing she's played by Cate Blanchette I honestly don't know how she could sound like an unequivocable hero anyway. I've never seen that woman play anything closer to that than Galadriel, and even she had to struggle with turning to the dark side sometimes.

Hey, let's not be unfair to snakes. It's perfectly possible to depict snakes as unambiguously good. Also, it really depends on what culture you're talking about; in Asia, snakes aren't exactly seen as "evil" creatures.

Seriously though, I feel it's a good idea for Kaa to look at least somewhat dangerous.

You can depict them that way through deeds, but to the Western eye there's a cultural stigma that places them securely in the menacing category unless you happen to like them. I do like them. They're my favorite living (primarily) land animal. Doesn't mean I don't understand that the culture's built to see something scaly and expressionless like that as a threat rather than a friend.

As long as they give Kaa something to do besides dropping exposition on Mowgli's backstory, they should be fine. Seriously, Disney really dropped the ball with Kaa in the 2016 film.

Even the original Kaa from the book whilst a "good guy" was still presented as being pretty darn scary and dangerous. So there is potential for this version to be similar

Exactly. Snakes are awesome animals, but they simply don't possess the traits humans associate with pure good. So while they can be good guys in stories, to present them in a way that screams pure good on first sight would require cute-ing them up to the point they're barely recognizable as snakes in the first place. Give them legs, give them whiskers, give them other traits we humans think of as cute. It's kind of what the Eastern world did with their dragons (serpents), IIRC. They made them good luck and portrayed them differently than they really are.

..."Portrayed them differently than they really are?" What's that supposed to mean?

Please tell me that isn't supposed to imply that us Asians are somehow misinterpreting our dragons.

edited 24th May '18 10:35:34 PM by dragonfire5000

I think that they're saying that Eastern dragons are altered depictions of snakes—that is, that snakes were "made ... good luck and portrayed ... differently than they really are".

I assumed they were saying that "Asian people depicted dragons as beings of good luck instead of what dragons really are." I hope that your explanation is more accurate.

I wouldn't say it is completely accurate that Asian dragons were all based on altered depictions of snakes. Chinese dragons may look snake-like, but their descriptions were more akin to a mish-mash of all sorts of different creatures: a horse-like head, the antlers of a stag, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, scales of a carp, claws of an eagle, soles of a tiger, ears of a cow, etc. Chinese dragons have also been associated with turtles and fish.

Funnily enough, Japanese dragons have been associated with different types of sea animals. It's said that a carp that manages to swim up a waterfall will become a dragon (and yes, this is the basis for why Magikarp evolves into Gyrados), and seahorses are thought to be baby dragons.

I wouldn't go so far as to say they're "barely recognizable as snakes." Viper, Serperior, and Juju all manage to be recognizable as snakes even if they've been "cuted-up" a bit.

Personally, I don't see snakes as all that different from other animals when it comes to portraying them as good guys. We've managed to make all sorts of dangerous animals appear "pure good," such as bears, tigers, and even sharks.

edited 25th May '18 10:00:17 AM by dragonfire5000

Saw a picture of what Baloo is going to look like, looks like he's on drugs.

"Please tell me that isn't supposed to imply that us Asians are somehow misinterpreting our dragons."

Noo, nobody's misinterpreting anything. I was going by the fact that, at the very least, all the depictions I've seen of Eastern dragons have been more snake-like than Western ones. Ours are closer to crocs and lizards.