Casting Call: The Jungle Book
It seems that Rudyard Kipling’s short story collection, The Jungle Book, is on Sony’s remake agenda. According to Variety, the studio has already recruited Harry Potter screenwriter, Steve Kloves, to pen a live-action script. Never ones to pass up fantasy-casting a late-19th-century work of fiction, we perused our actor archive for a suitable cast. In doing so, however, we realized that The Jungle Book is full of talking animals (not just a Disney thing), and really the only important human character is Mowgli. We have yet to tackle an anthropomorphic film and are a little unsure of how to go about it—should we transform them into people? Or just cast voices and have real life animals trotting about our fictional film? Does anyone happen to have a family of trained wolves? What did they do for Call of the Wild or Dances With Wolves? Should go the “experimental” route and please film students who like to use the word “meta” by dressing up our actors in animal costumes? Perhaps Sony can create some exciting CGI animals. We decided to cast based on voices for now—it took some will power to resist re-casting the voices of the Lion King (James Earl Jones! Jeremy Irons! Jonathan Taylor Thomas! Matthew Broderick! Nathan Lane!). Click through our slideshow to see who made the cut.
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