![]() It is as the impish, inquisitive hero of the earlier film, with a mop of unruly black hair, that most audiences know Mowgli. But Mowgli himself has managed to emerge unscathed from any controversy about the imperialist overtones of The Jungle Book, thanks in no small part to the 1967 Disney adaptation. “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilised person,” wrote George Orwell in 1942. It goes without saying that Kipling is a problematic, imperialist writer. And in 2018, there will be yet another Jungle Book, this time with motion-capture performances from Benedict Cumberbatch as Shere Khan and Christian Bale as Bagheera. That new versions of both stories are released this year – The Legend of Tarzan opens in the summer, with Alexander Sarsgård of True Blood representing surely the best chance yet for the loincloth to catch on in polite society – indicates that the tensions explored in them are far from resolved. Mowgli is a boy brought up among wolves, Tarzan a man happiest in the company of apes, but each serves as a repository for our most stubborn fantasies about who we might be underneath our civilised façade. In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan, where similar ideas were worked out in maturity. Mowgli appeared in eight of the 15 stories spread across two volumes of The Jungle Book between 18. It was, of course, Rudyard Kipling who created him. ![]() ![]() Director Jon Favreau discusses the film Guardian
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