Essay | Jungle Book: A Comparison of the Film and Novel

The 1967 Disney animated move The Jungle Book does not follow Kipling's story very closely. Disney's attempt to put Kipling's text to the television screen changed the entire focus of what the written text was trying to convey to the readers. The most explicit instances in which Disney altered the text was through the means of audio and visual depiction. Every story reflects specific values of the culture that originally produces it. As a result, when a story gets retold in another culture, elements of that story are often modified to reflect the change in audience expectations. Examples of these modifications deal mostly with how a character is portrayed by an audio voice, the addition/subtraction of plot elements, and alterations in a character's purpose.

Through the means of audio voices, Disney was able to apply different accents to explicitly show their audience each individual character's caste position. In Kipling's The...
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