The holiday gift-giving season is fast approaching, and that means it's time for Disney to give another of its classic animated tales the "platinum-edition" treatment. This time "The Jungle Book" ($29.99), which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, receives the honor.
The buoyant take on Rudyard Kipling's story about man-cub Mowgli has been remastered for this two-disc set. The result is a sharper, brighter view of the more-lovable-than-ferocious beasts who inhabit the Walt Disney cartoon-wild. Of course, kids accustomed to the pristine, digitally animated Pixar flicks may not find this movie quite as eye-popping, but that's only because "The Jungle Book" -- with its hand-drawn characters and backgrounds that resemble paintings -- is Disney done the old-school way.
In addition to earning an Oscar nomination for its most famous song, the catchy "Bare Necessities," "The Jungle Book" is best known as the last animated movie Walt Disney worked on before succumbing to lung cancer. He died almost a year before the film was released, but his influence -- as the many bonus features on the DVD make clear -- can be seen and felt throughout all of its 78 minutes. Several of the animators who worked on "Jungle Book" emphasize the importance of the movie's characters, a nice way of saying that the picture is a little short on plot. But it's also worth noting that Baloo the bear, tiger Shere Khan and other creatures were built around the actors who provided their voices (including Phil Harris, George Saunders and Sebastian Cabot), an approach that has become status quo in today's celebrity-studded cartoons.
The extras in the collection follow the template laid out by previous Disney DVDs -- viewers will find a well-done making-of documentary; several respectable featurettes; a few so-so games for the little ones; and a peek at what wound up on the cutting room floor.
In this case, what wound up on the cutting-room floot was Rocky the Rhino, an animal Disney helped develop and described as "a sort of Mr. Magoo of a rhinocerous ... half-blind and really dumb." As the storyboards from Rocky's big deleted "Jungle Book" scene demonstrate, the world of animation lost nothing by leaving Rocky out of the final cut. But knowing that this cliche mammal once existed may make "Jungle Book" fans value the jovial Baloo and his buddies all the more.
Best Baby-Elephant Bonus Point: File "The Jungle Book" in your brain in case you ever have to name every movie in which Clint Howard has appeared. The brother of filmmaker Ron Howard and master of the quirky-and-quick cameo role shows up on this DVD's making-of documentary -- the best extra of the bunch -- to discuss his job as the voice of an eensy elephant named Junior. "The memory of Walt Disney coming in [to the studio] and saying hi is something I will never forget," he recalls.
Weakest Bonus Point: The deleted songs on the DVD are vaguely interesting, if only from a film history point of view. But pairing each one with a single still photograph doesn't exactly take advantage of the moving-picture medium.
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PHOTOS: 'The Jungle Book' -- Walt Disney/'Fantastic Four' -- Fox
