Evaluating Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book

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“The Jungle Book” was most recently remade in 2016, as a live action version of the original cartoon that Disney created in 1967. I chose to analyze this version in particular, due to its increased praise for correcting some of Rudyard Kipling’s racist elements in the original movie. As a child, I was always very enthralled with animals and nature, so it made sense that “The Jungle Book,” with it’s constant blatant connections between human and animal, that this movie would be one of my childhood favorites. However, after reading more about the movie later in life, and having conversations about it, it’s clear that “The Jungle Book” is heavily lacking in several areas equality-wise. In order to evaluate the film with as little nostalgic …show more content…

In a lot of ways, this is a more cryptic form of what Robert Moore defines as “Ethnocentrism (or from a white perspective)” in “Racist Stereotyping in the English Language.” He aptly puts that “the psychological impact of the statement referring to ‘the master raped his slave’ is different from the impact of … ‘the white captor raped an African woman held in captivity” (Moore 372). By disguising different races/sexes as animals, the connotation of any prejudice content is even more muted than just using common language. In “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, the Prince is literally a beastly animal who is literally beastly in character, while Belle, a normal human, is supposed to continue to try to woo the beast despite his brute and abusive character. In “The Jungle Book,” however, animals have been used to represent non-white races in many cases. Notably, since Disney cast “Italian-American singer and trumpeter Louis Prima instead” of “Louis Armstrong” as the King of Swing in the original movie the result is a “racially hyperconscious, though possibly still-racist hybrid performance” (Waterman). It’s difficult to say what Disney should’ve done in this adaptation, but both options would’ve likely been considered racist. Additionally, both “The Little Mermaid” and “The Jungle Book” had difficult roots to accommodate for, simply due to their old-world

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