A compact review of The Jungle Book (2016)

 I saw the Jungle Book today and feel that I must write my thoughts down to fully express them.

    How can I say that The Jungle Book is exactly what I thought it would be, without feeling like it should feel? Mowgli's acting was good. The voices suited the characters mostly well (despite an odd mix of different accents in an Indian jungle). The pacing was decent and, at two hours, it wrapped itself up relatively well. The dialogue was fluid if not a bit overdone for teaching purposes. The CGI was as good as it gets, not a single detail went ungraphed. 

    And yet there was a distinct lack of soul. It didn't come together as an art form should. I cried at times, but the tears were greatly indebted to my own empathy and not the film's tender moments. The fight scenes were well choreographed and, aside from the difficult-to-track camera switches in times where movement was to fast for it to matter, the visuals were impressive. And still, the soul of the movie was never born. Every little detail was fascinating to muse over, but never able to carry my imagination from moment to moment without a purposeful attention span on my end. 

   Reading a story like The Jungle Book......watching a traditionally animated re-telling  of it, these angles worked because a great deal was left up to the reader/watcher to consider the abstract reasoning behind such a tale. If you weren't ready to understand, you weren't interested and weren't required to be. If you were ready, every corner of your soul was stirred and thrilled by the possibility behind the layers of symbols within the story, even if you didn't realise what was happening. But to see it as realistically rendered as possible takes something grand away from the point of creating the story in the first place. It takes away the observer's reason for witnessing it. 

    The CGI was as good as it gets, albeit still noticeably counterfeit to real animals, as the CGI must create it's own standard for realism by rendering gossamer detail without rendering the matte condition of an embodied soul. 

    I felt as though I was being tricked and had no way to express why the trick was endangering because it is "just a film". 

At any rate, this is becoming quite the chore; expecting thrill from film.