King Louie’s not an orangutan

One of the most impressive characters in this new version of The Jungle Book is King Louie, a giant ape voiced by a giant of the big screen: Christopher Walken.

An orangutan in the original, in the 2016 version King Louie is a gigantopithecus, and ancestor of the orang-utan that is long extinct, but was chosen for dramatic effect.

Neel Sethi, had never acted before

More than 2,000 people auditioned for the role of Mowgli in the film, and the boy who got the part was 12-year-old Neel Sethi.

He manages to carry the movie like a seasoned pro but, incredibly, he had never acted before in his life. In an interview, Sethi said the secret was actually trying not to act.

He said: “I’ve never acted before, it was my first audition.

My dad said ‘You have to be good. You’re not supposed to be yourself. You’re supposed to act!’ But they didn’t like it when I acted. They liked me when I was myself.”

Kaa was male in the original

While Kaa, the Indian python, was voiced as a male by Sterling Holloway in the 1967 movie. But this time around Kaa is a woman, with Scarlett Johansson taking on the role.

Jon Favreau decided to make the change because he thought there were too many male characters in the movie. It is the first time that Kaa has been portrayed as a female.

Indian pythons normally grow up to a maximum of around 10ft, in this film Kaa — when compared to Mowgli — would actually be around 100ft long.

It was filmed entirely in Los Angeles

All sorts of amazing jungle locations appear in the latest version of the movie, but amazingly every single one of them was created using VFX.

All filming took place in sound stages in front of green screens at LA Center Studios, with puppets from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop brought in for Sethi to act next to. The animals were created with key-frame CGI using footage of real animals and real actor movements to make them as realistic as possible and help them match the voices.

Sethi told that when filming the scene of him sitting on Baloo’s belly floating down the river, he was actually just sitting on a bit of Styrofoam with a brown carpet on it.

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 23rd, 2015