From the opening sequence of young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) racing through the jungle in the company of his adoptive wolf family and his feline guardian, the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), through its comic setpieces with the layabout Baloo the Bear (Bill Murray) and its sinister interludes with the anaconda Kaa (Scarlett Johansson), the despot orangutan King Louie (Christopher Walken) and the scarred Bengal tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba), the movie bears you along on a subdued current of enchantment, climaxing in a thunderous extended action sequence that dazzles while neatly tying off every lingering plot point and gathering up all the bits of folklore, iconography and Jungian dream symbols that have been strewn throughout the story like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs.
It's not accurate to call this "Jungle Book" a "live-action" version, since so much of it has been generated on a computer. But screenwriter Justin Marks, director Jon Favreau and their hundreds of collaborators render such distinctions moot. Combining spectacular widescreen images of rain forests, watering holes and crumbling temples, a couple of human actors, and realistic mammals, birds and reptiles that nevertheless talk, joke and even sing in celebrity voices, the movie creates its own dream-space that seems at once illustrated and tactile. It's the sort of movie you might inadvertently dream about after re-reading one of Rudyard Kipling's source books or re-watching the 1967 animated Disney film, both of which contributed strands of this one's creative DNA.