The Jungle Book: the making of Disney's most troubled film

Scrapped characters and songs, a firm 'no' from the Beatles, and Walt Disney at the end of his tether. Craig McLean visits Disney's archives to discover how The Jungle Book was made.

 

Early sketch of Mowgli and Baboo, from Disney's The Jungle Book

 

 

In a nondescript building in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Glendale, they’re keeping the magic safe. I can’t pass on the address. I can’t photograph the (blank) exterior, nor even the surrounding streets, and I certainly can’t tweet any images from the interior. I can’t use a pen inside, only pencil. I may want to bring a jumper, as the temperature is maintained at a cool, artefact-preserving 15C. If I want to touch anything, I have to wear white gloves. But actually, that’s not going to happen – no one touches anything, save the trained (and gloved) conservators. And just in case I feel tempted, there’s a warning, plastered on backlit display cases, from the little guy who started all this. “Attention! Original Artwork!” trumpet the signs over an image of Mickey Mouse and a paintbrush.

This is the Walt Disney Company’s Animation Research Library (ARL). It’s the top-secret home to 64 million pieces of artwork and production material, stretching back to foundational character Julius the Cat (1924), and soon to encompass work from the latest big-screen Disney venture, Frozen. From Snow White to Bambi to The Little Mermaid to Wreck-It Ralph and multiple points in between. That’s a lot of cartoonery, and a lot of history.

This 12,000sq ft facility used to be called The Morgue. “But this is not where artwork went to die,” explains one of my guides, so the name was changed. Now the ARL is a living, breathing resource that is available to all wings of the Disney empire. Putting on an exhibition in Australia? Reissuing an animation in cinemas? Researching vintage drawing techniques to give a new project a “classic Disney” undercurrent? You come to the ARL, where a project to digitise the company’s vast archives is ongoing and where the internal computer server is called Gems. That’s not an acronym; everything here is viewed as a gem.

And so the team behind the latest Disney release availed themselves of the ARL’s 24 staff and cornucopia of original pen and pencil drawings, animation cells and film reels. Next month sees the arrival of The Jungle Book on “Diamond Edition” Blu-ray. The loose 1967 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s short-story collection bristles with all sorts of bells and whistles and king-of-the-swingers excitement: an alternate ending, a deleted scene, something called “Disneypedia Junglemania”, and lots of extras besides.