How Disney’s New Jungle Book Movie Pushes the VFX Envelope

Jon Favreau explains why his new Jungle Book movie is both something familiar and unlike anything you’ve seen before

If you’ve already seen any of the trailers for Walt Disney Pictures‘ new The Jungle Book movie, you might be pretty shocked to learn that what you’re looking at is almost entirely computer generated. All of the animals and even the sets themselves are the result of cutting-edge visual effects work. In fact, the only practical performance in the film comes from 10-year-old actor Neel Sethi in his very first big screen role.

“We looked at 2,000 kids and he was number 2,000,” says director Jon Favreau.

Favreau recently joined The Jungle Book movie’s visual effects supervisor (and two-time Academy Award winner) Rob Legato, for a special behind-the-scenes look at the April 15 release, hosted at Disney’s El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. The theater itself is one of the venues at which fans will be able to see The Jungle Book movie in Dolby Vision, a brand-new laser projection system designed in part to combat the dimming effect of 3D.

“The picture is really bright,” says Favreau of the format. “Once you see it, it’s hard to look at a regular projection system ever again, especially in 3D… For this film, it was interesting to see this level of contrast and dynamic range. We’re dealing with, essentially, a computer-generated image that has a lot of information and latitude.”

“We’re creating a full, photo-real world that we can recognize as real,” adds Legato, whose credits include films like Titanic and Apollo 13, “We’ve all seen the jungle. We’ve all seen pictures of animals. We see how they move. We see how they walk and talk and we can tell if it’s artificial or not.”

The visual effects of The Jungle Book movie have been handled primarily by a VFX house called MPC, whose talented artists created designs for hundreds of different jungle creatures. Then Weta (who have had a great deal of experience with primates) stepped in to handle a sequence set around King Louie (Christopher Walken).

“I’ve done projects where you’re trying to get every [house] to match each other instead of look like it’s part of the movie,” Favreau explains. “The visual effects were such an important part of this that we wanted to treat it more like an animated film where we had our own studio.”

“Everyone supported the way we made this film,” says Legato, “which was to forget that we had a computer. Don’t use it for what a computer does well, which is kind of doing photoshopped skies and larger-than-life things. Do it to actually create a real movie that the suspension of disbelief is easier to let go of, because it looks like it could be conventionally filmed.”

Even though it’s very driven by the VFX, The Jungle Book movie features cinematography by Bill Pope, whose credits include both The Matrix and the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie trilogies. A device was created that allowed Pope to survey each scene within a computer just as he would a physical set. 

“Some people seek out an experience that they’ve never seen before,” Favreau continues, “and I’m proud to have the film that will introduce this technology in much the same way I was introduced with ‘Avatar’ to that tech. It’s the marriage of story and technology that always makes for an interesting presentation.”

For the story itself, Favreau looked at both Rudyard Kipling‘s 1894 book of stories and Disney’s 1967 big screen take.

“I think though that, as far as story structure, the ’67 actually had a lot to offer,” says Favreau, “so we tried to stick with it as much as we could. What I really tried to do, though, was focus on the images that I remembered from it before going back to look at it again. That was a trick that I learned on ‘Iron Man.’ It’s not necessarily what’s in the material that’s so important, it’s what you remember. I find that everybody has a collective memory that’s very similar. There were images that I remember very clearly that I listed off and those were the top priority. Then, as you go back and we started to break story together, you start to figure out that Walt and his team came up with a lot of the same conclusions and a lot of the same story points. There’s a lot of familiarity there.”

Although Favreau says that the new Jungle Book movie is not a musical, it will feature some of the music that the 1967 made famous.

“We did try to incorporate enough of the music so that it ticked the boxes of ‘this is what I remember,'” he says. “If I went to see this movie and it didn’t have any of the music, I wouldn’t be satisfied. That was the balancing act.”

Another tricky balance was finding precisely the right way for the new Jungle Book movie to depict its talking animals. Favreau and Legato looked at every previous example they could find (even Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Dog with a Blog) to determine exactly what works and what doesn’t.

“There are certain animals that talk well,” Favreau explains. “A snake is harder to talk. You want it to have phonemes, the mouth movements that are required to make the sound. We always erred on the side of subtlety.”

Although the Jungle Book movie’s animals were always intended to look as photo real as possible, some of the features of the actors playing them were actually incorporated into the character designs. There’s not so much of Scarlett Johansson in the python, Ka, but you might find that Baloo’s eyebrows bear a subtle resemblance to those of Bill Murray.

“For King Louie, we really wanted him to have blue eyes and the look and the way [Christopher Walken]’s face is rigged,” Favreau continues. “We did some motion capture work and key framing and video reference… We tried to make it informant enough that you could see the soul of the actor, but not enough to take you out of the reality of the movie.”

The cast of the new Jungle Book movie also includes Ben Kingsley as the panther Bagheera, Idris Elba as the tiger Shere Khan and Lupita Nyong’o and Giancarlo Esposito as the wolves Raksha and Akela.

“You have to breathe life into this thing,” Favreau puts it. “Otherwise, it’s just an exercise in technology and that’s not entertainment. You need to have a beating heart in there and that’s what your cast gives you.”

Check back for more information on Disney’s new Jungle Book movie in the weeks to come! If you missed it, be sure to check out yesterday’s new Jungle Book TV spot.