Revisiting The Visual Effects Of 'The Jungle Book' Where 'Everything Was Hard'

Rob Legato clearly loves a challenge. His two Academy Awards are for supervising the visual effects of both “Titanic” and “Hugo,” two films that featured complex and realistic computer graphics. Both films might pale, however, to the work his team pursued for director Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book.” And now, the critically acclaimed spring blockbuster is on the shortlist for this year’s Best Visual Effects Oscar.

Describing “The Jungle Book” as a live-action version of Rudyard Kipling’s tales and Walt Disney’s 1967 animated feature is something of a misnomer. The film is almost completely CG outside of the performance of Neel Sethi as the lead character, Mowgli. Most audiences will likely recognize the fact that the animals Mowgli interacts with are CG, but the fact that the rest of the environment is a visual effect may come as something of a surprise.

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Legato describes his first conversation about the project as a “pitch in reverse.”

“‘This is what we want to do. Can it be done?’ And it was like, ‘Yes.’ And everybody wanted to make the same version of this movie, a live-action version of this film, not a fantasy version,” Legato recalls. “That is what piqued my interest. Knowing what we know once you decide to embark on the journey, the journey tells you how to do it. You don’t have to have all the answers immediately, except to have the presence of mind to go on the journey to battle every hurdle when it comes up. It was an unbelievable challenge to say no to.”

Because the effects were so integral to the production, Legato and his team were involved from the beginning and spent two years with Favreau making the film. He notes, “When we start production on a movie like this, there is no pre-production production or finishing. It’s all blurred together.”

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Not only did Legato’s team have to create the setting for the story, but they had to bring to life the animal characters Mowgli talks to as well. One of the toughest choices was how to depict the animals speaking. Because they don’t look like cartoon characters and are supposed to be photorealistic, having Idris Elba’s voice come out of a tiger while the animal’s mouth moves the wrong way could have completely taken the audience out of the movie. The decision was made to imagine each animal had vocal chords like a parrot that would require less movement of their mouths.

Legato explains, “A parrot talks, words come out and he talks the way he talks. You sort of buy that convention. What if the animals had vocal chords like a parrot does? How would they move their mouths and enunciate a word and not enunciate a word to look like a bad dog-food commercial? We just chose to do it under the top. You don’t have to have the mouth move [with] every word.”

It also helped that Favreau wasn’t interested in having the animals speak directly in front of the camera in ways that didn’t assist the story.

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“We [shot] the movie knowing the animals are real and not shoot the movie telling the audience we know how special it is including interaction,” Legato says. “We had to make interaction moments, but we didn’t have to put a lot of them in. You don’t put a lot of them in unless you’re trying to show off. We did it when it was appropriate so you believe it. When [Mowgli] grabs [a character’s] fur, you believe it, and we spent a fair amount of time making that work.”

The biggest challenge came from, arguably, the most fantastical character in the film, King Louie (voiced by Christopher Walken). The giant ape is the centerpiece of one of the biggest action set pieces in the picture. Legato admits that was tougher to pull off than a sequence earlier in the film where Mowgli gets caught in the middle of a cattle stampede.

“King Louie was the [gap] that was harder [to] bridge…because he’s a giant ape. You’ve seen everything else,” Legato says. “You’ve seen cattle and that was a hard sequence to pull off, the cattle run. But we are, again, ‘if it was real and such a thing danger-wise was possible,’ it would be filmed pretty much the way we filmed it. The King Louie stuff — he’s chasing him down buildings and tearing up things — it’s a visual-effects scene. And that’s harder to bridge that gap and suspend disbelief. That was the one that kept me up more nights than not.”

“The Jungle Book” is available on DVD and digital platforms. The nominations for the 89th Academy Awards will be announced on Jan. 24.