The surprisingly good "Return to Neverland" suckered me into thinking that this Jungle Book sequel might be worth seeing. I was wrong. It's a real mistake to essentially copy a classic Disney movie if you're not even going to bother trying for quality. The shoddiness of the animation in JB2 was just painful, as it was so easy to compare it to the original. The characters are drawn with thick, clumsy black outlines, like Hanna-Barbera cheapos; the scene with Mowgli walking across the floor of his room to look out the window is so poorly done, it looks like a cutout figure is being pushed across on a stick. The shadow puppets Mowgli makes at the beginning are more interesting. The background is static and without any of the nuance of the first Jungle Book, where the different parts of the jungle were lovingly drawn in depth and varied colour, and the fronds and leaves even MOVED. The new characters are just weird: the Indian father looks like they've recycled Stromboli from 'Pinocchio', and just slapped a smile and a turban on him. And Disney now seems to have a habit of uglifying any character too young to look sexy; it started with the pudgy (but still likeable) Lilo, and now we've descended to the absolutely porcine Ranjan. Apart from the crude look of the movie, the plot, as other people have noted, is non-existent, and the whole film is essentially an exercise in parasitism. Get the original 'Jungle Book' and forget about this junk.
Review of The Jungle Book 2
