Actor, author, and possibly the world’s foremost expert of green screen and motion capture technology, Andy Serkis is certainly a man of many talents. And, according the Hollywood Reporter, soon he’ll be able to add “director of a major studio production” to that, having just signed on to helm Warner Bros. forthcoming live adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling classic, The Jungle Book.
The project, which has already gone through a number of directors including Babel helmer Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Richie Cunningham himself, Ron Howard, is yet to announce any major casting choices, though this announcement puts it back in the race against rival studio powerhouse Disney, who are moving ahead with their own Jungle Book film, helmed by Jon Favreau and bringing Idris Elba in to voice the menacing tiger Shere Kahn.
Though on paper Serkis might seem an odd choice, there’s no need for everyone to go and get too precioussss* about it (*Author’s note: Not even remotely sorry.) Serkis gained experience in the director’s chair, having honed his skills with CGI on the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings films, as well as on Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Stephen Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tin Tin, and the recent Planet of the Apes movies.
Warner Bros. version of the film will stick a lot closer to Rudyard Kipling’s original story, which is a hell of a lot darker than your molly-coddled, Disney-numbed childhood might allow you to remember.
That’s not to say that the classic animated Disney version was a parade of sunshine and flowers. Like all things, they had the best intentions at the time, but with the ravages of age a slightly unsettling feeling comes creeping to the surface.
I don’t know what it is, but something about that song just ain’t right. It ain’t right at all, I tells ya.
Photo: Frederick M. Brown for Getty Images
