The Jungle Book 2

The Jungle Book 2 is a 2003 American-Australian animated musical film produced by DisneyToon Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures and Buena Vista Distribution. The theatrical version of the film was released in France on February 5, 2003, and released in the United States on February 14, 2003. The film is a sequel to Walt Disney's 1967 film The Jungle Book, and stars Haley Joel Osment as the voice of Mowgli and John Goodman as the voice of Baloo.

The film was originally produced as a direct-to-video film, but was released theatrically first, similar to the Peter Pan sequel, Return to Never Land. It is the third animated Disney sequel to have a theatrical release rather than going direct-to-video after The Rescuers Down Under in 1990 and Return to Never Land in 2002. The film is a continuation of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and is not based on The Second Jungle Book. However, they do have several characters in common. When released, it was criticized mainly for the quality of its animation and the similarity of its plotline to that of the original film.

The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–94. The original publications contain illustrations, some by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After about ten years in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six-and-a-half years. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Vermont. There is evidence that it was written for his daughter Josephine, who died in 1899 aged six, after a rare first edition of the book with a poignant handwritten note by the author to his young daughter was discovered at the National Trust's Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire in 2010.

The tales in the book (and also those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families, and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle." Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of Mowgli, an abandoned "man cub" who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The most famous of the other four stories are probably "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", the story of a heroic mongoose, and "Toomai of the Elephants", the tale of a young elephant-handler. As with much of Kipling's work, each of the stories is followed by a piece of verse.

Jungle Book (1942 film)

Jungle Book is a 1942 independent American Technicolor action-adventure film by the Hungarian Korda brothers, based on a screenplay adaptation by Laurence Stallings of the Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book about a wild boy who is kidnapped by human villagers that are cruel to animals as they attempt to steal the jungle's lost treasure. The film was directed by Zoltán Korda, produced by his brother Alexander and art directed by their younger brother Vincent. The cinematography was by Lee Garmes and W. Howard Greene and music by Miklós Rózsa. The film starred Sabu Dastagir as Mowgli. Because of the war, the British Korda brothers had moved their film making to Hollywood in 1940, and Jungle Book is one of the films they made during that Hollywood period.

Plot

In an Indian village, Buldeo, an elderly storyteller, is paid by a visiting British memsahib to tell a story of his youth. He speaks of the animals of the jungle and of the ever-present threats to human life posed by the jungle itself. He then recalls his early life: