"Hi." "My name's Bruce Reitherman." "I had the privilege of voicing the Mowgli characterin The Jungle Book." "Got the job essentially through a swift little bit of nepotism." "My dad, Woolie Reitherman, was the director on the show." "And I'm really happy to be here." "My name is Andreas Deja." "I'm a supervising pencil animator here at Walt Disney Studios." "I started here in 1980 and worked on movies like The Little Mermaid," "The Lion King, Aladdin, Roger Rabbit and a few others." "The Jungle Book was the first Disney movie that I ever saw when I was a kid and it made me want to become a Disney animator." "I'm Richard Sherman." "My brother Robert and I wrote a lot of the songs for Walt Disney Productions over the many years, particularly the '60s and early '70s." "We wrote Mary Poppins and Jungle Book and many of the Winnie the Poohs." "Throughout this commentary, we're gonna hear some rare interviews from people who worked on this movie." "ANDREAS DEJA:" "There's something about these soft drums that say jungle, that sound like jungle." "RICHARD SHERMAN:" "There are a couple of heroes, musically, on this project." "A great deal of the credit goes to George Bruns who created the background score, and Terry Gilkyson who wrote this keynote song, Bare Necessities." "Then Bob and I had written five other songs for the show that fattened out the score and told story." "I think one of the unsung heroes who should be mentioned is Walter Sheets who orchestrated the sound, which instrument played what and how it was played." "That was Walter Sheets, who underscored with George's musical sketches the entire score." "It was a team of a lot of talented people who did this." "DEJA:" "Don Griffith, layout artist, who set the stage and sketched out these backgrounds before they were painted." "He was still working at the studio when I started in 1980." "Al Dempster was one of the key background painters, and Bill Layne, who came up with the final styling for the movie." "It's just wonderful, because right away, you are in the movie." "You're seeing original production backgrounds." "I just love this slow camera move through the jungle." "There's a little multi-plane here." "That's the technique that makes things like a forest three-dimensional." "You have a foreground, a middle ground, a background." "So, they separate these painted levels and it just really feels like you're walking along with the gorgeous music playing, and you're hooked already." "RICHARD:" "The film was originally released in monaural sound." "But it was recorded in stereophonic." "So now it is being re-released in stereophonic sound." "DEJA:" "When I saw this for the first time," "I thought, "How did they do this waterfall?"" "BRUCE REITHERMAN:" "Dan MacManus had to take live action footage that was shot with a camera that wasn't very registered and had to re-register every frame to get it to not jiggle relative to the static backgrounds." "DEJA:" "So, there is a real waterfall?" "BRUCE:" "It might be Angel Falls." "They had it from a natural history show." "DEJA:" "It just works beautifully." "NARRATOR:" "It was a sound like one never heard before..." "BRUCE:" "This isn't me, by the way." " (DEJA CHUCKLING)" " Mowgli crying here is my body double." "DEJA:" "Ollie Johnston animated the panther at the beginning." "You can see how subtle the acting is, how Ollie uses his eyes." "He's concerned." "What is he gonna do?" "This is not broad animation like Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse." "This is thinking animation." "We have some of Ollie Johnston's comments." "OLLIE JOHNSTON:" "We had a concept about Bagheera." "There was a story man there who always had every pencil sharpened and all lined up on his desk, every pad of paper lined up, everything as neat as a pin." "And we figured, "There's Bagheera." "That's exactly the way he would be."" "While Baloo would be the kind of guy, if you came into his room, he'd have his feet up on the desk, he'd have a sandwich half-eaten and crumbs all over the place." "He'd say, "Sit down." "Take five."" "Really easygoing, the kind of guy who loved the sensual pleasures, eating and scratching and singing." "And the way Walt saw him, full of rhythm." "So, that's the way it developed." "BRUCE:" "There's a great stretch here with no voiceover." "There's no narration on this whole bit, where the mother adopts Mowgli as her own." "It's all done just with music." "It allows the audience, I think, to settle in and get comfortable." "DEJA:" "The rule of thumb for animated films is, the less dialogue, the better." "Animation works great in pantomime." "You use your body language, expressions." "I think this is the one movie that uses that kind of a philosophy more than many others." "There isn't that much dialogue." "Look at this sequence." "There's a little bit of narration, but these are thinking drawings." "When you see them, you know what's going through their head." "BRUCE:" "He could be talking here." ""I wonder if she'll accept the cub."" " It's all done with animation." " RICHARD:" "All with facial expressions." "BRUCE:" "It's easy to imagine Bagheera talking through this, but it would be such an interruption." "DEJA:" "Some little wolves are reused from the puppies in 101 Dalmatians." "It was just a way of saving costs." "Something had been animated that would fit, so those puppies were redrawn as wolves and reused." "BRUCE:" "I remember a couple moments through the film that I'll point out." "We actually did live action material for this on the back lot." "We shot 16mm material of me just as a reference." "I don't think they ever rotoscoped it, but many mannerisms the man cub has, the way he brushes the hair out of his face, and the adolescent 11-year-old quality to his movements, they captured from live action stuff they shot of me." "It's a little bit difficult for me to even look at this and still see myself." "I confess that I get so caught up in the movie, that I forget I was even part of it in a way." "DEJA:" "This is atmospheric staging, the clouds moving in the back, that group of wolves draws you right in." "You know something tense is happening here." "An animator called Hal King did most of the scenes with the wolves." "BRUCE:" "There's a tremendous amount of storytelling that goes on here, set up very economically." "We're only three or four minutes into the show, and we've already established most of the main characters." "We'll have mentioned the tiger by the end of this scene." "We still won't have seen him." "And the whole dilemma for the rest of the movie is set up in these first moments, with the interactions of these characters." "You know the characters are who they are, and where Mowgli's headed." "You know what the peril is that will be facing him." "In a way, you introduce the villain." "We don't see the villain in this show until quite late." "DEJA:" "But you talk about him." "BRUCE:" "But you talk about him." "And the characters demonstrate their profound fear." "Everybody in the jungle is afraid of Shere Khan, despite their unique abilities to run fast and be agile like Bagheera, or Baloo is a big bear, or the snake." "They all have their own ways of being equal competitors in the jungle, but when the tiger walks on the stage, you don't mess with the tiger." "DEJA:" "This is an interesting situation because Bagheera, of course, is concerned about Mowgli." "You see that in the animation." "Uh..." "But in the end, when you think about a panther, he's a predator." "He could eat the kid." "But the way he found that little baby, his sympathy goes out." "This thing is just lost and he wants to help." "And you don't reason with it, you just buy it, because the animation and those thinking scenes that show you close-ups, show you what he's really thinking, just sell the idea that he's concerned about the kid and is going to help him." "BRUCE:" "It's another underappreciated aspect of animation, that there's a tremendous sense of dramatising." "You have to light the scene, in the same way that someone would if they were shooting a film noir, or a comedy or an action/adventure." "There are things you have to do to make the scene play, to give the audience a certain emotional impact, and then to draw their attention to the important things in a way that's unique and has a sense of variety." "This is a great example." "It's very dramatically staged." "If it were a stage play, there'd be a lot of levers pulled to make the lighting just so, so it has a sense of emotional depth to it, as well as artistic visual interest." "RICHARD:" "In this sequence, the eyes really dominate, because they are what's brightly lit and the pupils are saying it." "Your eyes are watching the eyes of the character." "And it's a wonderful device." "Walt always wanted to focus on the eyes because the eyes say it all." "DEJA:" "Walt told the animators," ""Spend some time on getting the eye unit right."" "That's what the audience looks at." "It gives you insight into the soul of the character." "This is Milt Kahl's section beginning here where he's sending the boy up the tree." "Some stunning drawings of both characters." "This is the first comedy sequence in the film." "RICHARD:" "This is so cute." "BRUCE:" "The Disney touch." "If you can't make people smile..." "DEJA:" "How can you better express the awkwardness of the situation than by the boy climbing all over the panther, squishing his face?" "And then the panther helping him up is so beautifully choreographed." "BRUCE:" "Bagheera's voice, too, with Sebastian Cabot's dignity to it all." "Every encounter of Bagheera with either Mowgli, or especially with Baloo the bear, is a potentially humiliating one for him." " It brings him down from this pompous..." " (DEJA CHUCKLING)" "He's a warm-hearted fellow, but he has this British dignity about him." "It's wonderful to see the bubble pop now and then." "What have we here?" "RICHARD:" "Sterling Holloway did the voice of Kaa." "The one thing that I think was an incredible plus, was he decided he'd have a sinus condition, where he s-s-slightly hissed every time he opened his mouth." "Of course, we wrote the song that way for him." "(CHUCKLING) He is so funny and menacing all at the same time." "Look at those eyes." "DEJA:" "The character design changed a little bit when you look at Lady and the Tramp and starting maybe on Bambi." "The eyes were very big, especially with young characters." "You used that baby formula, big forehead, large eyes." "It makes them very expressive." "And maybe Mowgli still fits that category 'cause he's a kid, but then Baloo has smaller eyes, more like a real bear." "The tiger has small eyes." "But they're still expressive." "You still read what they're thinking." "RICHARD:" "Kaa has special eyes." "BRUCE:" "No kidding." "RICHARD:" "Hypnotic eyes." "DEJA:" "His head's too large." "RICHARD:" "I have yet to meet a snake that looks like Kaa." "DEJA:" "But the essence of a snake is there." "I recall seeing those close-ups on the screen of Kaa looking into the camera and you start feeling a little dizzy yourself, watching these coloured rings coming off the screen." " It really worked." " RICHARD:" "That was Milt Kahl." "DEJA:" "Yeah." "Milt and Frank Thomas." "This is a somewhat broad expression coming up on Bagheera." "He's trying to resist the hypnotic look on Kaa." "Then he finally has to give in, and look how wide those eyes get." "RICHARD:" "Look what he does with the snake." "BRUCE:" "One eye at a time." "I love this animation." "Imagine how hard it is to get the perspective on all those little joints." "DEJA:" "It feels like a reptile, like a real snake." "Look at the weight on the snake body as it unfolds." "You can just feel it." "RICHARD:" "This is incredible stuff." "In the case of Sterling Holloway, who does Kaa, it's so amazing that while we were doing Jungle Book, he was doing the voice of Winnie the Pooh in a totally different way." "But he's such a remarkable, versatile actor that he could, with that same voice, be a totally different character." "He could do it because he had talent and Walt knew that." "Walt cast him in these things." "Walt was the one that said, "We can use Sterling."" "I was the one who said, "But, Walt, he's doing Pooh."" "He said, "He can do it." "Don't worry." And he did." "Of course, he walked in there and just nailed it." "Walt could file something in his brain for years." "In the case of Darleen Carr, there was a girl, Darleen Carr, who was on the lot." "She had a part in one of the television shows." "And Charmian, her older sister, was in Sound of Music at that time." "And Darleen was singing to herself one day, walking down the studio street." "Bob and I were working on this My Own Home song." "He said, "Boy, that's a perfect voice."" "He said, "Darleen, would you come to our office and sing something?"" "We wanted to hear it with a girl's voice." "My voice is not right for it." "So she came up and she sang it." "We said, "Could we tape it?" Just as a favour for us." "We played it for Walt about a week later at a story meeting." "He listened to it, "Yeah." "Uh-huh." "Okay."" "Then we'd go on talking about it." "That was about a year later that we were actually going to cast that number." "We said, "Who do we want to get?" Everybody was starting to talk about it." "Walt said, "You already have her." "The girl you had on the tape."" "He didn't know it was Dar." "He said, "That's the voice." "That's what I hear for the girl."" "So, Darleen came back and we did it, and it became a wonderful thing." "Here comes the first of the songs that we wrote for the film." "It's the jungle patrol, Colonel Hathi and his elephants." "And as they come trooping through the jungle, they are these big clunking animals." "They crush everything as they march through." "It was definitely a military march." "We wanted it very heavy and ponderous." "So, we had it..." " (PLAYING PIANO) - (SINGING) Hup, two, three, four" "Keep it up, two, three" "That was that heaviness that we wanted to inject as they crushed the underbrush in front of them." "And the lines..." "If people stop looking at that beautiful animation, what they're saying is, they're idiots just destroying everything in their path." "They're saying, "The aim of our patrol is a question rather droll," ""for the march and drill over field and hill is our military goal." ""Hup, two, three, four." Hwang, through everything." "And we crush everything in sight." "That's kind of a funny inside joke, which we all were laughing heartily at." "But the animation is so good, you never stop to think of what they're singing." "BRUCE:" "Is it true that Bob wanted to do that as a waltz?" "RICHARD: (LAUGHING) No." "DEJA:" "What I love about these elephants, you feel the weight, and the facial expressions, the idea of moving flesh." "And the way the tusks are anchored in there, yet they're flexible." "To work all that out is just so beautiful." "That means "stop."" "These just have to be some of the funniest elephants ever drawn." "What great characters." "BRUCE:" "They never say a word, except for this one." "Winifred." "DEJA:" "Verna Felton did the voice of Hathi's wife, which always struck me odd, a woman in the ranks." "RICHARD:" "Winifred, she was married to him." " She's always bringing him down." " DEJA:" "A wonderful character voice." "She did one of the fairies in Sleeping Beauty, one of the elephants in Dumbo." "So, she goes way back as far as Disney films." "BRUCE:" "Typecast." "Arms!" "BRUCE:" "The sound effect sells that." "RICHARD: "Dust on your muzzle, soldier."" "We had so much fun discussing what was gonna be said in this drill." "We all would fall down on the floor laughing with the various attitudes and the military haircut." "He gives him a whisk and cuts the hair." "This was stuff that we..." "Not only Bob and myself, everyone, we all contributed to this." "Walt himself would come up with these crazy things." "It was a team." "We all did our specialties and we all did our own thing, but we all contributed to some of the humour." "We just sat around looking at these things and would throw out ideas." "Sight gags, many times they'd get Roy Williams to come in and draw a few sketches, like whisking off the hair or one of those little things." "It was then I received the Victoria Cross..." "The voice of Colonel Hathi, that's J. Pat O'Malley, who was a wonderful English voice actor who did many things." "In Jungle Book, he also was the lead vulture." "We'll come to him later." "He's one of the vultures." "He was a delightful fellow." "In Poppins, we used him as one of the people that said," ""Um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-eye" in Supercalifragilistic." ""A lovely thing she is, too," he said." "HATHI:" "Wipe off that silly grin, soldier." "This is the army." "DEJA:" "This is such a funny section." "It just reminds me of my times at the army." "(CLICKS TONGUE) Lieutenant, that haircut is not regulation." "RICHARD: (MIMICKING) "Not regulation."" "There." "That's better." "BRUCE:" "From the Disney vaults, we've pulled some archival material, interviews with my dad, Woolie Reitherman." "WOOLIE REITHERMAN:" "I think it's awfully important to give a great deal of creative credit to the animators." "It isn't easy, giving animals a human personality." "John Lounsbery animated on the elephants, and Eric Cleworth." "Then you've got to go back even further than that." "The situation was done by Ralph Wright, the great story man." "I'll have no man cub in my jungle!" "It's not your jungle!" "BRUCE:" "Again, that teenage rebelliousness." "He's not gonna take any guff, even from an elephant." "Another hallmark of the Disney animated style is being able to distinguish..." "They're all just big, lumping elephants, but by the end of the scene, you know that there's half a dozen with very specific personalities." "An elephant never forgets." "DEJA:" "There was a short done in the early '60s called Goliath II, which dealt with elephants." "The main character was a tiny little elephant." "He was as big as a frog, almost." "And it dealt with that kind of a handicap." "Bill Peet wrote that story." "Some of the character designs are a little similar." "They're more refined, 'cause this is a feature." "You have to have a wider range of expressions, but when you see that short, you can see how this started out with Disney elephants." "The first Disney elephants were on Dumbo." "That was a whole different style, because at that time, things were round and even fleshier, less graphic." "To the rear, march!" "RICHARD:" "This crash up at the end of this is absolutely hysterical." "BRUCE:" "Is that bit flip drawings that are done the same way twice?" "DEJA:" "Yeah." "There was quite a bit of repeat animation done for this movie." " Pop!" "Look out!" " (GROANING)" "(ALL LAUGHING)" "DEJA:" "This is original, though." "RICHARD:" "Look at the squish." "DEJA:" "And the camera just pans across." "(RICHARD CHUCKLING)" "BRUCE:" "There's a scene similar to that in Robin Hood, where the rhinoceroses are on the playing field." "It's similar, where they pile up and it's the same sense of masses crumpling." "It's almost like a car accident, where the fenders are bashing in." "DEJA:" "Complete crash." "RICHARD:" "Fender bender." "DEJA:" "This is Eric Larson's animation coming up here, where the boy and the panther are having yet another argument." "Bagheera!" "Where are we goin'?" "You're going back to the man-village right now." "I'm not going." " Oh, yes, you are." " I'm staying right here." "RICHARD:" "The theme you're hearing in the background is My Own Home." "It's woven through the score." "All the time, you hear references to it." "The human call." "(SPLASH)" "(SPUTTERING)" "Ohh!" "DEJA:" "That hurt." "Oh, that does it." "I always liked the water in this movie." "It's very simple." "But it's also very effective." "BRUCE:" "That's really the whole style of the animation of the whole film." "Not necessarily simplicity, but there's an economy to it." "There's a mature, "Let's only do what's necessary" ""and move on to the next thing."" "It's about the story." "DEJA:" "This has to be you, Bruce." "This is based on live action." "BRUCE:" "Indeed, it is." "I remember a big plastic rock that I had to jump on and then jump off the edge of." "Although, in my case, there was a large pile of foam pads at the bottom." "DEJA:" "Mmm-hmm." "BRUCE:" "It's interesting how this goes on for a ways, too." "This is quite a long scene, where Mowgli's just wandering around, lonesome." "DEJA:" "You can't rush those scenes." "I think the animators knew that." "To really get the emotion across, those scenes take time." "BRUCE:" "I love this transition here, too." "RICHARD:" "And the actual voice of Phil Harris coming out of nowhere." "BRUCE:" "Here, it takes a sinister..." "The music has" " an ominous kind of quality." " RICHARD:" "It sets you up." "(RUSTLING)" "BRUCE:" "And then, the big entrance." "(SINGING) Doo-bee, doo-bee Doo-bee-dee-doo" " (ALL LAUGHING)" " RICHARD:" "Right away, you know." "DEJA:" "Ollie Johnston, who animated this, told me Walt acted this out, and these are almost Walt's movements." "This is Ollie where he talks about that very point." "OLLIE:" "Walt had acted out forme how he saw Phil Harris, one of the things that really gave me the key to his personality." "I thought the relationships and the characters here were really great." "The warm feeling that came off between Mowgli and Baloo the bear was one of the best things we'd ever done." "It developed over a whole series of sequences." "It didn't develop over just one scene or anything." "It was something that built up over a lot of footage." "I'd credit Frank Thomas with a lot of that because he and I worked with the bear and Mowgli together, mainly the two of us." "DEJA:" "This is Frank Thomas' section here." "He takes over animating both of them." "Look at the contrast between these characters, the little shrimp and massive bear." "How much fun is that?" "Talking about Frank Thomas, he told me once," ""Be careful when you have two characters in the same scene." ""If they think alike, you have a problem," ""'cause you don't have any contrast and nothing to work with."" "(TINY GROWL)" "(ALL LAUGHING)" "And you have beautiful contrast here." "Mowgli's very suspicious." "Baloo is playing." "He just wants to play along." "Within that play, he's teaching the kid a lesson." "You've got beautiful things to play with." "RICHARD:" "Jungle Book was a left field assignment, as far as my brother Robert Sherman and I were concerned, because we came into it from a meeting we had with Walt." "It was about 1965." "There was talk about a big brouhaha that had taken place a few weeks earlier." "I had no idea that they were developing a project called The Jungle Book, based on Rudyard Kipling's great book." "Bill Peet, who was a great story man, he had done 101 Dalmatians, and Bob and I had worked with him on Sword in the Stone." "He created a version of Jungle Book, which was very authentic to the book." "Which is a great story, but it's a dark, mysterious story." "Walt, at one point, had this very big meeting with Bill and with Terry Gilkyson, who had written a whole song score for this project." "Which again, was in line with exactly what Bill Peet was creating, and that was a dark, serious analysis of this story." "And Walt said, "That's not a Disney picture." ""That's not what I want to do." "This will be a disaster."" " It was as simple as that." " DEJA:" "I just want to add something." "I saw in our archives here, some early backgrounds for that dark version that you are talking about." "Even the backgrounds were darker then." "It was a mysterious, dark jungle where you didn't know what would be behind the next tree." "BRUCE:" "It had a more human..." "The temple ruins, and a pirates' treasure-y kind of quality to it too." "Very spooky." "RICHARD:" "Spooky is a good word." "It really was." "I remember vividly, Woolie Reitherman was called in," "Larry Clemmons, who was a writer, came in, and my brother and myself." "And a number of other key people were brought into a meeting in Walt's office." "The conversation went like this." "Walt said, "How many of you fellas read Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book?"" "Nobody raised their hand because nobody had read it." "I timidly raised my hand and said, "I saw a movie called Jungle Book" ""with Sabu, that young Indian actor."" "He said, "Yeah, yeah..." "But anybody read the book?" ""No?" "Good." "I don't want anybody to read this book!" ""I want to tell you what I want to see in this picture."" "And he started describing the storyline." "The storyline was simply that a boy was raised by wolves and he was taken to the man-village for his own safety." "He had to live there, but he was reluctant to go." "He has adventures along the way and meets various characters." "He told it in his own inimitable style, which was acting out every part and doing the faces." "It was a very inspiring meeting." "When we left the meeting, he looked at us and said, "I want fun songs." ""Find the scary places and write fun songs in them."" ""Well, okay, Walt, we'll do that." And that was our assignment." "What happened was," "Bob and I were about to leave after we were all juiced up." "And he said, "By the way, guys," to Robert and myself." ""There's one really fine song that I liked that I want to keep" ""that was written by Terry Gilkyson, Bare Necessities." "Is that okay?"" "We had just come off of Poppins." "We were all steamed up with ourselves." "Bob was, "Sure, that's fine."" "It turned out to be that was a huge song, a very wonderful song." "Terry got the nomination for an Academy Award for Bare Necessities." "People have, over the years, congratulated me and my brother for having written that song." "And it's, "That's the one we didn't do!"" "But we love the ones we did do." "He was a fine songwriter." "He'd done some very big songs like Memories are Made of This," "Marianne." ""All day, all night, Marianne."" "Thomasina for The Three Lives of Thomasina, also the theme song for The Swiss Family Robinson." "He was a Disney songwriter, a very good one." "BRUCE:" "It's sort of the nature of the business, that good ideas don't always fit." "The only test as to whether they really are a good idea is if they serve the entire film." "When you change the direction of the film, good things go by the wayside." "RICHARD:" "We had a sequence in Jungle Book with a rhinoceros that was sliced out, 'cause he said, "We have one frenetic scene." "We don't need another one."" "We were all set to write a song for it, but we never did." "Walt was never afraid to drop something." "Come on, Baggy, get with the beat." "The bare necessities of life will come to you" "DEJA:" "This section here is Ollie Johnston's again." "Ollie was very high on having characters touch." "He thought that adds a sensitivity and an intimacy, and you see the reaction when Mowgli grabs Baloo's fur." "That contact was very important for Ollie." "This is an animator who really feels the music, feels the material." "He doesn't analyse a whole lot." "He just goes by gut feeling and that's on the screen." "Sometimes assignments are given out per character, one character per animator." "This is the way we do things now." "On Jungle Book, Walt liked the idea that one supervising animator handles a whole sequence, because the interaction with the two or three characters can be really worked out by one mind." "Of course, they're both dancing in this section, so it had to be one animator working that out." "You could split it up, but I don't think you get the cohesive quality of two characters interacting when you hand it off to two different animators." "BRUCE:" "I had done the voice of Christopher Robin on the first Winnie the Pooh short." "As a result, I was around the studio." "My dad directed that as well, Woolie Reitherman." "They had cast another young boy to do the voice of Mowgli and recorded some substantial amount of dialogue with him." "He came back at the age of 12." "It took three or four years to make these things." "His voice had changed enough that they couldn't match the two." "I think there was some conversation about how his voice was too old sounding, and they wanted to capture the young innocence of the Mowgli character, so they wanted to go with a younger kid, who didn't have that edge of a boy whose voice is beginning to turn." "I would have been 10 in 1965, and the thing took three years of production at that time, so I probably started when I was nine and finished when I was 11." "This is my big moment, guys." "DEJA:" "Everybody quiet." "Forget about your worries and your strife" "BRUCE:" "Yeah, man." "It was a very fun time." "It all happens in an afternoon, and you've got storyboards to go over for the first half-an-hour, 45 minutes." "You have a thorough idea of what the intention of the whole scene is about." "You go into these recording sessions, and it's like having adults take you through a really cool comic book, with these great storyboards that are spectacularly drawn, that have sketches with dialogue underneath, almost as if it were in a balloon in a comic book." "After a bit of that, you sit down and..." "I wasn't reading music or anything." "They'd play a tune on the..." "I'm not sure if we had a temp track to work with." "RICHARD:" "I think you had a temp track." "Piano, drums, a rhythm track." "BRUCE:" "And then I just sang." "RICHARD:" "Did you do it without Phil?" "I'm pretty sure we did it separately." "I'm sure I was not there on that day." "I may have been there the day he did this, but I didn't record at the same time." "RICHARD:" "They were careful." "They wanted to get him right and then they would set you into it." "They did that all the time, separated voices." "BRUCE:" "I was usually standing there with Larry Clemmons, the primary writer." "He'd feed me lines of the characters that didn't happen to be in the room." "Then, behind the glass window, you've got half a dozen technical people and my dad, who I think rather deliberately, left most of the direction to Larry." "I think he appreciated a father telling his own son exactly what to do..." "How many times do you want your dad to tell you how to throw the baseball?" ""Okay, Dad." "Now I want to do it myself."" "When it's the coach telling you how to throw the ball, you tend to listen and take the advice to heart perhaps better." "In many ways, I felt like the character feels, where he's got these older, wise people in the room, who are looking out for your best interests." "I was the voice of myself." "I wasn't acting so much as I was reading lines with a degree of motivation." "In general, the most difficult things were the things an actor practices." "How to laugh convincingly." "That can actually be learnt." "Those were things where I didn't have the craft angle of it down as much." "The total number of hours I spent actually recording was quite few." "But you're paying attention." "As a nine-year-old, it's not as though I worked up a sweat, but it was hard work and I tried to do my best." "It was obviously important that you get it right." "If there's nothing else about the legacy of Disney animation, there's a sense of class and of getting it right, not being willing to settle for what isn't the best." "I gave it a good go." "From the Disney vaults, we've pulled archival material, some interviews with my dad, Woolie Reitherman." "WOOLIE:" "When we picked Bruce, there was an interview process." "A lot of kids came in, and we do that for all the kid voices." "And I think the thing that was good about Bruce was it was natural, whereas some kids are coached, or they want the script first so they can go over it with their kid." "And I just brought him in there." "There was no coaching." "There was no feeling on his part that this was gonna be something he really wanted to do and get on commercials and all that stuff." "I think a lot of times, a little flub from a young person makes it a young person instead of a professional." "(SINGING) Dah dee-ding dah-ding-ding" "RICHARD:" "We were challenged by Walt to come up with some fun things." "The first thing we did write for Jungle Book was this next number." "And we wanted to go completely different than anything." "We wanted to establish a jungle beat and jazz rhythm at the same time." "And also a chance to do a little ad-lib scat singing." "So we put this... (PLAYING PIANO)" "Boop-ti-a-digga-digga Boop-do-do" "Tigga-tigga-dagga-boom-boom-boom" "That kind of a thing." "So we had this jazzy tune done by this hilarious character," "King Louie, king of the apes." "And voiced by the inimitable Louis Prima." "The story point was, he figured he could control a lot of things if he could have the secret of fire." "And this poor little character, he knows nothing." "He's been raised by wolves." "DEJA:" "Look how far they go with Mowgli chewing that banana." "You just feel that mass of banana in his mouth." "And ol' King Louie... (SINGING) Bah-be-do-bay Bu-bu-doo" "RICHARD:" "All the while he's riding the tune, playing with it as he goes." "BRUCE:" "Two bananas." "Three fingers." "I remember some of the early animation on this." "I may have steered the production in the wrong direction because I laughed hysterically." "I was in tears by the end." "I wasn't the greatest test audience because I was an easy touch, but this was good fun in the beginning." "Now, I'm the king of the swingers, whoa" "The jungle VIP" "RICHARD: "King of the swingers" was our discussion at the time." "We said, "He's an ape who swings in a tree." ""Jazz is swing music," ""and a guy literally swings, if he's an ape, he swings in the tree."" "So, double meaning." "Of course, if pure Dixieland chords are going in... (PLAYS CHORDS ON PIANO)" "This is a Dixieland tune." "(PLAYS TUNE ON PIANO AND SCATS)" "And I just think the animation is unbelievable." "It's totally inspired, really, by Louis Prima and his band." "Parading around and everything is strictly what Louis did in the sessions." "BRUCE:" "Even the orangutan's posture, the way he moves his feet, pigeon-toed." "DEJA:" "All Frank Thomas animation." "There's a wonderful dance this little monkey does that's something only Frank can do." "RICHARD:" "Frank Thomas was a wonderful jazz pianist." "He played with the Firehouse Five Plus Two, the Disney band that used to play all the time." "DEJA:" "Watch it." "He's very cocky and then he goes into this little dance." "Watch it." "There!" "Nobody can animate this but Frank Thomas." "The analysis in that is mind-boggling." "BRUCE:" "You take for granted too, half the work for this is coming up with the ideas." "There are a ton..." "Look at this!" "There are a ton of great ideas in this that only last three seconds apiece, then you're on to the next one." "Obviously, animating, the hard work of executing the ideas is a big part, but there's a tremendous amount of creative talent pumped..." "It's very rich." "Very dense, you know." "RICHARD:" "With the recording of I Wanna Be Like You, we never could get the two guys together." "They were busy band leaders and performers." "They were always in different towns when this was taking place." "So, we brought Louis Prima and Sam Butera and the Witnesses, that was the backup band, they did the "scooby-doos" and that stuff, into the studio and had a series of sessions with them to get Louis Prima's version of I Wanna Be Like You, that part of it." "In actuality, we recorded it originally with Sam Butera and the Witnesses and Louis Prima playing, but it didn't have that full rounded sound." "It was a little too sketchy." "So, using that music as a pattern," "George Bruns added a full instrumentation." "Walter orchestrated it and they redid it." "I remember the remarkable trumpet material, which originally was played by Louis Prima and was done by a fella by the name of Cappy Lewis, who was a great trumpet player." "Now, this parade..." "But that was the band." "They took a look at how they paraded around." "Very typical of what Louis Prima used to do." " Hey, de-zop-ba-nonie..." " (LAUGHTER)" "RICHARD:" "Now, this is the duet of double talk." "And we had originally conceived that the jazz section or the riffing would be aping, and that means doing the same thing." "If Louis Prima said, "Scooby-dooby-do,"" "then Sam Butera said, "Scooby-dooby-doo."" "And they'd have a conversation that way musically." "Four months later, we got Phil Harris, finally, to come into the studio to do his section of it." "We were listening on the phones, all smiling, "He's gonna love this."" "He said, "I can't do this." "This is not my kind of thing." ""I don't..." "These aren't my words."" "And Woolie said, "What would you do?"" "He said, "I wouldn't say those words."" "What you get is this remarkable spontaneity of conversation." "Where Louis Prima says, "Scooby-dooby-do,"" "he says, "A ree-ba-naza."" "He says something totally different." "These wonderful, funny sounds come out." "It's called riffing or scat singing." "But they're having a conversation in scat." "It's never been done before." "That was a first." "I'll never forget it." "Everybody in the booth was screaming with laughter, it was so funny." "At one point Woolie said, "You don't have to keep doing it." ""You can say something else." "I'll say some words."" "He said, "Get mad, baby," and things like that, which all came out of Phil Harris." "You don't write that stuff." "That just comes out of the musicians, out of their soul." "We all knew we had something special there." "BRUCE:" "That is one heck of a sequence." "It's one heck of a song." "As much as The Bare Necessities gets all the historical credit, that thing stands up to anything else that ever happened at Disney." "RICHARD:" "Thank you, Bruce." "DEJA:" "I don't know what it was like in this country, but lines were around the blocks." "You couldn't get tickets for it." "RICHARD:" "Did they have it in English with subtitles or in German?" "It was dubbed." "In European countries, they have a French version," "Spanish version, German version..." "I saw it in German first." " RICHARD:" "Good voices?" " Magnificent." "RICHARD:" "What about the "Scooby-doo-rebanaza"?" "DEJA:" "They used the original voices." "There's no translation in German for that." "RICHARD:" "No translation in English for that!" "No translation, period." "It's amazing." "It's a little piece, but it's so special." "There were so many people contributing to it." "BRUCE:" "Well, as you know, Dick, ending a song is a difficult thing." "Finding that little way to make it all..." "RICHARD:" "Listen to this." "Man, that's what I call a swingin' party!" "RICHARD:" ""That's what I call a swingin' party."" "BRUCE:" "The final touch." "DEJA:" "It's interesting how the pacing changes here, from this high-energy number, you're just trucking through the jungle, and then the mood completely changes." "I don't know if you ever thought about this, but this is a movie where you have no props." "There might be the occasional banana or leaf or something." "You know, with acting, you like to have a table to place somewhere, or a pipe or something that gives you mannerisms." "There are no props in this movie, and still the acting is so strong." "RICHARD:" "He does have coconut shells." "BRUCE:" "A little costuming." "DEJA:" "These sequences are difficult to animate." "You have the three main characters." "One is asleep, and the other two are having an argument." "There is not much you can go through." "They don't move very much." "It's all in the gestures and the attitudes." "Ollie Johnston animated this whole sequence, and just gave it so much subtlety and really brought the two to life." "BRUCE:" "And it has this simple," ""We've got to get him back to the man-village."" "They probably say that same line in different ways four or five times." "RICHARD:" "Give a lot of credit to Larry Clemmons." "He came up with a lot of these lines." "They really, truly are wonderful." "Back story on Larry, he used to write lead-ins for Walt Disney for his television shows." "Prior to that, he used to write for Bing Crosby, who had that wonderful laconic, easygoing way of speaking." "DEJA:" "Here's Larry Clemmons, one of the key story people on the movie." "LARRY CLEMMONS:" "When they put me on Jungle Book, that was my first writing on an animated cartoon feature." "Walt called me in his office to give me the assignment." "He held up the book by Rudyard Kipling, and he said, "First thing I want you to do is not read the book."" "I took the book anyway and looked at it." "It was disjointed chapters." "There was no continuity." "So we had to bring it together for our medium." "And we just built a story." "What we did, we'd start with the main sequence in the middle of the picture, not the beginning, with the main characters." "We'd learn our characters." "From there, we'd expand either way." "Walt said, "Let's do the meat of the picture, establish our characters." ""Let's have fun with them." ""Let's have the audience care what's gonna happen to the boy."" "Walt said, "The beginning and ending of the picture will come naturally."" "I wouldn't do the whole script." "We'd do it scene by scene." "And the animal characters were designed by Ken Anderson." "I would look at them and get a feeling for them." "Then we'd cast the voices, which is so important." "When an animator would listen to the voices, he could see attitudes, expressions, gestures." "Which helped you out for future scenes, getting their dialogue." "And the business, the situation, what they did, their actions." "Can't a guy make one mistake?" "DEJA:" "You can really see how Ollie is looking for things to do." "He has to do something." "He can't just talk, open his mouth." "RICHARD:" "I love the shiner he has, the black eye." "BRUCE:" "What I love about these characters is," "Bagheera has this dignity." "He's always looking down at the lowlife, Baloo." "And Baloo actually thinks Bagheera's a square." " (RICHARD CHUCKLING)" " There's a friendship there." "It's a little bit of a buddy film at this point." "But it's become so popular with modern animation, that there's a lot of cynical back and forth sniping at each other." "With the Disney stuff of this era, especially, even though there's this tension, there's a sincere affection too." "They're not mean-spirited or adolescent about it." "It's a very grown-up awareness of your friend's fullness as a character." "RICHARD:" "I think respect for the other person's qualities, so they were never putting each other down." "They were chiding each other, kidding each other, but not putting each other down." "DEJA:" "This is something Eric Larson told us, that if you have characters enjoying each other, being with each other, liking each other, the audience will like them." "It's that simple." "RICHARD:" "And none of them were heavies." "They were all doing the right thing in their own way for Mowgli." "In the end, they become pals and go walking off together into the jungle, because they discover something about each other that they really like." "BRUCE:" "There's a little bit of a Bogian finish from Casablanca to it." "Ingrid Bergman goes off in the aeroplane." "RICHARD:" "A beginning of a beautiful friendship." "BRUCE:" "Great music underneath it." "RICHARD:" "Yeah, this little sad sound is beautiful, of George Bruns, who created the background score." "He used that theme on several occasions, 101 Dalmatians." "Sleeping Beauty was the first time he used it." "DEJA:" "Here are some of Ollie Johnston's comments." "OLLIE:" "On Jungle Book, Woolie Reitherman, the director, let us who were more experienced take sequences." "So you had a lot to say about the way your sequence would be cut and the way it would be developed, the way the material would be handled and the way you saw the characters personally, and the way they would relate to each other." "So it's really a great creative experience." "And it happened to be the last picture that Walt worked on." "And he had quite a bit to say about the picture, even though he was very busy on many other projects at the time." "(SINGING) Look for the bare necessities" "DEJA:" "This is where Frank Thomas takes over, and uh," "Frank worked really hard on these scenes." "It's again about small gestures, you know." "How do you convey the mixed feeling that he has?" "Here again, he scratches himself and Frank talks about this scene a lot." "Having the hand glide down the neck and scratching." "BRUCE:" "He discards the banana, and normally he would eat it." "DEJA:" "You have to come up with those things." "Here we have Frank Thomas talking about that very point." "FRANK THOMAS:" "In Jungle Book, we had an interesting problem with Baloo and Mowgli." "Baloo, the big old bear, was an easygoing guy, but he has to take Mowgli back to the man-village." "He doesn't know how to go about this." "He feels terrible." "How do you show that a bear feels terrible?" "What gestures can you use?" "The boy, Mowgli, thinks this is the greatest thing." "He's gonna spend his life playing in the jungle with Baloo, so he's happy and exuberant." "So, I went through this particular scene where Baloo doesn't know quite what to say." "He's trying to get Mowgli to sit still so he can tell him something." "Mowgli is running around in a circle, hitting him where he can and kicking him." "So, I made these little drawings called thumbnails, working out different things that might be good to use." "Where he runs around, and every place that Baloo looks," "Mowgli's gone on around." "It's kind of tough to figure, because it was too easy for Baloo, really, to catch Mowgli." "Just one big swipe of his paw and he would have had him." "But the scene worked out pretty well, actually." "You get the audience to go along with you and believe this is happening." "You suspend disbelief, as John Hench used to say." "Where you goin'?" "BRUCE:" "And now here, again, some material of my dad, Woolie Reitherman." "WOOLIE:" "We went through a lot of bears before we got Phil." "None of them seemed right." "You've got to trust the animators at this point, that they feel something in the voice to see how that could be translated into images and a drawing." "We'd gone through a whole lot of guys." "Finally, Walt came back and he'd been at Palm Springs to a party where Phil Harris had been." "He says, "Why don't you try Phil Harris?"" "Some of the animators said, "Phil Harris in a Rudyard Kipling film?"" "And Walt says, "Why not?"" "He says, "People don't read that book anyway." ""We're gonna make our own Jungle Book."" "There were some unhappy animators, but once we told Phil not to be a bear, but to be Phil Harris..." "He said the same things, but in his own vernacular, and it had great character." "RICHARD:" "There's George." "BRUCE:" "This is a great entrance." "I love this foreground stuff going on and his pursuit of the deer." "This is just super." "DEJA:" "The drawing's just held still." "You see the power of the animal." "BRUCE:" "Is this multi-plane?" "DEJA:" "A little bit." "Here, too." "You can see the foreground out of focus." "Milt Kahl did all these scenes, and all those stripes is just a nightmare as an animator." "You have those stripes and you can show form when you place them right." "BRUCE:" "He has an entrance with no dialogue, but you know exactly what he's about." "RICHARD:" "The powering his body." "DEJA:" "Look at the shoulders, the shift of weight happening there." "That was so beautifully observed." "It's interesting when you watch the Disney features throughout the years, and how the style of the characters and the art direction really changed." "Early on in the '30s, it was Freddie Moore, a great animator, a very natural animator, who was the main architect for the early shorts, whether it was Mickey Mouse, but they became very dimensional." "By the time it got to the '50s, things became sophisticated and stylised." "I think it just happened naturally, because these animators had done this round, sculpted look for so many movies that they wanted to challenge themselves and do something more graphic, something "artsy," so to speak." "Sleeping Beauty was really the first one where that happened." "You see straight lines going through the characters and angles." "Very sophisticated drawings." "By the time it came to 101 Dalmatians, same thing." "Very graphic." "You even had black lines on the characters, so they looked like real drawings." "You had black lines in the backgrounds." "By that time, the Xerox process had come in, which has to do with transferring the animators' drawings onto cels." "In the old days, up to Sleeping Beauty, the animators' drawings had to be hand inked on cels and then painted." "That became a very expensive process." "From the early '60s on, the animators' drawings were then xeroxed." "It was a big artistic graphic statement." "Walt was not that crazy about 101 Dalmatians, the way it looked." "It was a little too..." "I guess too artsy for him." "And the crew had to keep that in mind." "By the time it came to Jungle Book, they softened the look a bit more." "The backgrounds became, again, painterly, like the earlier films." "The characters had black lines." "So Jungle Book was the one movie where you had soft backgrounds with somewhat hard edge character drawings." "But it still works beautifully." "BRUCE:" "It's difficult for a son to talk about his father's contribution to an art form that he thought of, oftentimes, as one of the defining art forms of the 20th century." "He started at the studio in the late '30s to be involved in virtually all the full-length animated features, starting with Snow White and all the way up to Sword in the Stone, where he was the first guy to get directorial credit" "on a feature at the studio." "And then here, with Jungle Book, getting directorial and production credits." "Aristocats, Robin Hood, Fox and the Hound, Rescuers..." "He was directing or producing all of those programmes after Walt's passing." "Again, my dad, Woolie Reitherman." "WOOLIE:" "Of course, when you talk about Jungle Book, you've got to talk about Walt." "He checked out about halfway through the picture." "This guy left so many roots in all of us to go for the personalities and not get a complicated story." "This was so intuitive about Walt." "The story came out as the most simple story we've ever done." "I know it influenced me all the way through Jungle Book." "All of the pictures I did since then," "I went for strong characterisations, strong voices that fit the character." "It did make the pictures ever so much simpler to construct." "In the days after Walt checked out, there was a very tenuous or vulnerable situation for the cartoons, because there were some people that thought we had enough of them, could reissue all the time, and maybe we didn't have to make any more." "But it was because Walt had set this theme of simple story and strong characters with quite a lot of humour, and of course, pathos and excitement also." "It was that kind of simple statement he would make that would stick in us guys that kept the animation medium alive, and has now brought it to where this wonderful medium that Walt started is gonna keep going." "I'm just happy it finally ended up that way." "DEJA:" "When I was visiting Milt Kahl a few times after he had retired, and I asked him about the tiger and the pantherin Jungle Book." "I said, "How did you get ready for this assignment?" ""Did you watch tigers for three weeks at a zoo?" "What did you do?"" "He said, "I got some of our live action footage and some outtakes." ""We had done a movie called A Tiger Walks." ""And I watched Jungle Cat, which was one of the true life adventures." ""And just sketched out of that," ""and applied that to Bagheera and Shere Khan."" "I've always wanted to go back to those movies and see if there's something there I could pinpoint what he saw, and I did." "In Jungle Cat, I have drawings that look identical." "He's sort of looking away, three-quarter ear..." "How he researched that kind of pose." "It's fascinating." "In the title section of the movie, A Tiger Walks, there is that one scene that Milt used for the tiger where he walks away, does this beautiful turn." "That's a real tiger, but it's a drawing." "It is unbelievable and it's in the title sequence of A Tiger Walks." "He used that reference." "It's just fascinating to find that out, where they get their juices from and what they learn from live action." "BRUCE:" "The same is probably true with the bear scratching material." "It's broadly rendered in a more comic fashion, but a lot of that same stuff where the bear scratches his back and head, the essence of how a bear enjoys a simple pleasure in life, of the bare necessities, it's great." "DEJA:" "Nice staging." "A little kid, feeling lonely." "BRUCE:" "Again, this stuff, they shot live action of me." "This was sort of the Beatles era." "I remember having longish hair." "There's three or four times where I brush my hair out of my face." "Where I..." "Where the character, Mowgli, brushes his hair out of his face." "They patterned it on the way I must have done it at the time." "DEJA:" "It works, beautiful little kid gestures." "BRUCE:" "It is a little kid gesture." "DEJA:" "Weight is an all-important thing." "If you don't have weight in your characters, you don't believe them." "Then they stay drawings up on the screen, and that has to do with analysing." "When a character takes a step, how far does that knee bend?" "How heavy is he?" "This is just a question of analysing that." "It's almost a technical aspect to animating, 'cause the main thing is the entertainment, the personality." "But it needs weight." "It has to feel natural." "Milt always said, "If it's not natural, it's no good."" "That was his take on it." "This is Frank Thomas' section, right here." "RICHARD:" "Now, the hypnotic song, of course, is a fun thing." "We actually had written a song for Poppins that we didn't use, called A Land of Sand." "Mary Poppins was gonna take the children on a mysterious journey." "And it went like this... (PLAYING PIANO)" "That was originally written for Mary Poppins and they didn't use the sequence." "So, we decided to use that same tune for Kaa, the snake." "RICHARD: (PLAYING PIANO AND SINGING) Trust in me" "Just in me" "Shut your eyes" "And trust in me" "Long before we ever cast Kaa, we had that hissy snake." "But of course, a lot of it was added to by the actor, by Sterling Holloway." "He did wonderful things with it." "We just had a lisping, we had the "S's."" "BRUCE:" "I almost remember being in the room on that day when he was there." "And that one line where he goes, "Oh, my sinuses."" " Just those three words." " RICHARD:" "He added that." "He put in, "I sprained my sacroiliac."" "He loved the song, loved playing with it." "He came up to our office and we taught it to him." "Then we went down on the sound stage that same day." "He learned it in a day and Walt wanted to hear it." "He was very insistent on hearing everything." "He came down from his office." "We had a take." "And he said, "Yes-s-s-s."" "(ALL LAUGHING)" "BRUCE:" "I think the whole shtick with Kaa, especially the second time around, is some of the most inventive animation ever created anywhere." "When you think about it, he has no arms, no hands, no legs." "He has a face and eyes, and then he has this great body that is put through some incredible paces to get some great laughs." "They're subtle laughs." "You know, "Cross my heart", and the trunk of his body makes a cross." "And the staircase and all these wonderful little touches, where he giggles and he covers his mouth when he's being fey." "RICHARD:" "And when he gets tied into a knot and can't get through the jungle that way." "BRUCE:" "And he has no features with which to express himself, other than just the postures of this tube." "It really is an incredible achievement in animation." "DEJA:" "I think the credit for those kinds of story ideas and acting ideas probably go to the story people, as well as the animators." "If the story person has an idea for what the snake can do, becoming a staircase, the animator makes that work, animates it." "Sometimes it would be the animator's idea." "I've seen story sketches that actually have that already in them." "There's Milt Kahl again with his magnificent tiger." "Look at the way he pulls the snake's tail, how rubbery it feels." "This was wonderful and you completely buy it." "You wouldn't say for a second, "A snake can't do that."" "BRUCE:" "And how big is he?" "And here, the sense of movement is animated by these little details of the surface texture of the snake's body." "It's a remarkably well-executed piece of animation." "It's so believable." "DEJA:" "This is a great sequence between the two of them because the tiger just doesn't trust the snake." " And he's threatening, of course." " (RICHARD LAUGHING)" "I thought perhaps you were entertaining someone up there in your coils." "Coils?" "Someone?" "Oh, no." "I was just curling up for my siesta." "DEJA:" "These things are so beautifully staged." "Those poses just read." "And those expressions..." "Look at those extreme expressions." "And that hurts." "You look at that and it chokes you." "RICHARD:" "Of course, it does." "DEJA:" "You can feel it." "It's not going down." "It's stuck." "BRUCE:" "Reminiscent a little bit to me of what the Pixar guys did with Mike Wazowski in Monsters, Inc." "You've got a spherical object with one eyeball and a mouth." "Yet, with that you get all these great expressions." "RICHARD:" "The voice of Shere Khan." "George Sanders had done In Search of the Castaways several years earlier, and Walt was very impressed with his work." "He knew his work before that, but when this came up, who would it be," "I remember in one meeting, Walt said," ""Why don't you test Sanders?" "Bring him in to do it."" "He thought it was a challenge because George Sanders had never done a voice for an animated film before." "So it was a fun thing for him." "He was so perfect for it." "DEJA:" "I remember talking to Ken Anderson about it, when they were looking for a type for the tiger, and he said somebody brought up the name George Sanders, then Ken did a few rough drawings of the tiger and that sold it." "Then Milt Kahl took over and did the final character design." "The tiger was set from then on." "It's an interesting situation when you have famous people doing the voices, because you don't really want the audience to think about George Sanders, to think about Phil Harris." "You want them to focus on the character." "So they certainly inspire the personalities of the characters." "But also the way the characters look." "Shere Khan is a tiger, but he's also George Sanders." "That big jaw..." "But therefore, that voice really seems to be coming out of that character, whether it's the tiger, King Louie, they just fit perfectly." "I don't know if audiences then were really recognising those famous voices." "But with all these years passing, they're fresh, wonderful characters." "I ran into that situation when I animated Scar on Lion King, because I had a famous voice." "I had Jeremy Irons to work with." "I thought, should I try to make him look like Jeremy Irons?" "So I looked at some of Jeremy Irons' movies and got some stills." "I just tried to sort of arrange the facial features." "I just wanted to get that nice combination where you really think that voice is coming out of that drawing." "That was very important to me." "BRUCE:" "That to me is part of the magic of what animators do, because they are half of the thing on the screen that we see acting." "You call them animators and think of them as people who draw, but they're acting with a pencil." "RICHARD:" "It's living it, you feel it, the emotion comes out in the pencil." "It's amazing." "It's like writing music." "It comes out of some special place." "DEJA:" "It's kind of funny when you meet people and you're introduced to them." ""I work for Disney." "I'm an animator."" "People's reaction..." "Most people are delighted because everybody loves Disney." "But some people just don't know at all what animators do and what that means." "I had this one person, she felt kind of sorry for me." "She says, "You work for Disney?" ""So you are the one who has to do all these drawings."" "I said, "Yes, but I love doing all these drawings."" "There's this misconception that we are all drawing slaves." "I explained to her that I don't even think about drawing when I'm working." "I think about the feelings of the character and what is going on in the character's head, and the drawing is secondary." "Her mouth just dropped." "RICHARD:" "This, of course, was pure fun." "We just came up with a Beatles set-up." "Oh, and, there was a movie called Marty where they stood around saying, "What do you wanna do?"" ""I don't know." "What do you wanna do?"" "And this is a complete homage." "A sort of an honour to that wonderful picture." "But they're doing it with Liverpudlian accents." "(ALL LAUGHING)" "Very funny." "Okay, so what we gonna do?" "I don't know." "What do you wanna do?" "RICHARD:" "The speaking parts were voiced by J. Pat O'Malley, Chad Stuart..." "Of course, Chad Stuart is better known as half the singing team of Chad and Jeremy." "And Lord Tim Hudson." "They did all the wonderful cockney voices." "DEJA:" "Also, again, this is a real challenge for the animator because they're bored." "How do you animate bored characters?" "RICHARD:" "They're waiting for someone to die so they can eat them." "In the book, these are very grim, ugly characters who eat the dead." "DEJA:" "I love when the feathers fly when they do a broad gesture." "BRUCE:" "They're all angles, too." "They've got this gawky..." "They're very birdlike." "There's no question that they're birds." "RICHARD:" "The ugliest birds ever." "DEJA:" "But I love the animation of this." "This is still Milt Kahl and the introduction to those characters." "BRUCE:" "Mowgli starts off as this innocent, trusting," ""I wanna be a pal of all the guys in the forest."" "And everybody he trusts betrays him to an extent, even Baloo." "He feels that, even though they have his best interests, from his perspective, he's been betrayed by all these adults in his world." "And now it's one more set of guys who want to good-time him." "RICHARD:" "This is pure Disney, because now the guys that you think are the least sympathetic are the ones that are gonna become his pal." "BRUCE:" "They understand what it's like to be without anybody else." "RICHARD:" "That's right." "DEJA:" "It takes him a while to warm up to the idea, because he has no reason to think these are the ones who are gonna stick by him." "You can see that change during the song, when he lightens up and joins in." "It's very subtle." "BRUCE:" "In a funny way, this song sort of sums up the whole movie." "Each of them do, in a way, but it's all about friends being there for each other." "RICHARD:" "Friendship." "The Beatles were so very popular." "We decided to write a quartet song that would be for four Beatles to sing." "We actually wanted to get the Beatles at one point, but their manager wouldn't let them do it." "They wanted to be taken more seriously." "They thought this was..." "It would have been sensational." "BRUCE:" "These are the guys that did Help!" "RICHARD:" "I know." "We wrote this song as a barbershop quartet kind of song independent of that." "But after, we decided to do them with Liverpudlian accents." "He said, "How about doing it with the Beatles?"" "A feeler was sent out to them, but it didn't materialise." "We had a wonderful quartet called the Mellomen who did it." "BRUCE:" "Were they English or did they affect the accent?" "RICHARD:" "No, they put it on." "Except we took J. Pat O'Malley's voice and put him in with this actual group to give it the sure English sound." "BRUCE:" "And when George Sanders gives the virtuoso last notes," " was that his voice?" " RICHARD:" "No, the last note was not." "We didn't have him that time." "George Sanders was a good singer, he would have done it." "He was..." "And so Bill Lee of the group the Mellomen did the last George Sanders..." ""That's what friends are for" down in the bottom." "DEJA:" "That's a very low register." "RICHARD:" "My favourite line's coming up." "(PLAYING PIANO AND SINGING) And when you're lost in dire need" "Who's at your side at lightning speed?" "We're friends with every creature coming down the pike" "In fact we never met an animal we didn't like" "(CHUCKLING) And of course, these are vultures." "Vultures eat everything." "They wait for something to die and eat it." "Terrible." "A friendly claw" "These all are animals that behave as real animals." "They speak and have certain human emotions, obviously, and human motivations." "But at some level, we believe them as the animals that we know them to be." "RICHARD:" "They move as animals, walk on all fours." "They don't stand up on their hind legs and imitate humans." "They're doing their animal thing." "DEJA:" "That is a challenge for the animators." "Four-legged animals always are, because you don't have the hands to articulate a gesture." "You could lift up a paw for a moment, but even that could look odd on these kinds of animals." "Your overall body language and the way you tilt the head, what facial expressions you use, is much more important when dealing with four-legged animals." "BRUCE:" "If for a moment, you get it wrong, the character disappears in the mind of the audience." "They're watching a cartoon that's a bunch of pictures then." "DEJA:" "Can't be taken seriously." "You're just walking a fine line of how human can you get?" "There are some scenes where you actually see him clap his paws, which is very human, but you show it in a close-up." "If you show that in a long shot and you see his whole body, he wouldn't be able to hold that pose." "Choose the staging for those gestures very carefully." "(CHUCKLING)" " Boo!" " (SPUTTERING, YELLING)" " Let's get out of here." " Gimme room!" "Gangway!" " (THUNDER CRASHING)" " Run, friend!" "Run!" "BRUCE:" "As a story point, there's a wonderful way that Mowgli's never a victim." "He's this defenceless little kid, and as most kids do, there's no fear." "He thinks he can handle anything." "But he's as most kids are." "He's a brave little kid that's willing to try stuff and he's not gonna be bullied by these guys." "I won't run from anyone." "DEJA:" "Those are amazing expressions on him." "BRUCE:" "Is there a point when animating that you finally get it?" "DEJA:" "It takes at least seven or eight scenes." "Then you need to fix your first ones, because you hadn't gotten the character." "It's about five, six, seven scenes where you warm up a little bit." "But in the end, it is all in the voice." "If the voice is this rich, if you're a decent animator, you can't go wrong, because it's so..." "It gives you all the colour of the thought process and changes they are going through." "Good voices like these just make it a pleasure." "Mowgli, run!" " Let go, you big oaf!" " Ooh!" "Take it easy." "Take it easy." "Hold it." "Hold it." "Hold it." "Whoa!" "BRUCE:" "There's so much action and mass." "The drama of these titans here, heavyweights going one-on-one." "DEJA:" "This is the climax." "The final battle." "BRUCE:" "The struggle between Shere Khan and Baloo, a big several hundred pound..." "You buy it entirely." "The animation is so convincing." " It's this fight to the death." " They're battling." "DEJA:" "It's funny how even in this action sequence, there's still comedy like this." "He'll pull his whiskers..." "Baloo is being dragged behind by the tiger's tail backward." "BRUCE: "There's teeth in the other end."" "(ALL LAUGHING)" "DEJA:" "This is a serious sequence, but you still want to break out of that occasionally and lighten it up." "BRUCE:" "My dad, Woolie, had the reputation, deservedly so, for handling big dramatic scenes." "As an animator, he tended to do the monster of a whale in Pinocchio, the fight between the dragon and the prince at the end of Sleeping Beauty, the conflict between the dinosaurs in Fantasia." "He had an appetite for humour that was on the broad side." "He animated quite a bit of Captain Hook, in Peter Pan, in a way that was more broadly comic than much of the rest of the movie." "But there's also a vitality there." "My dad was nothing if he wasn't a vital, vigorous, life-loving kind of guy." "I think these moments are indicative of that sense of," ""We could use a good jolt of energy here."" "You've got so many dramatics." "Fire and lightning." "The staging is terrific." "RICHARD:" "The story all comes together here because of "man's red fire."" "Many times it's referred to." "And here the fire is the one thing that is the nemesis of Shere Khan." "DEJA:" "It's really essential that it's Mowgli who gets rid of the tiger." "BRUCE:" "The preciousness of the quality of these shows is something we appreciate now as adults, but you've got to remember you're making them for kids who are young." "Not only for kids who are young, but that's a big part of the audience." "You want to make it work for everybody." "I think my dad never got stuck on the idea that it was such fine art that we couldn't make a place for some rollicking good fun." "These guys had a lot of fun doing this." "There was a very brotherly, slapstick kind of approach to it." "These guys were artists." "It's also the manifestation of these guys' inner souls." "It's a manifestation of their spirits." "Really, I think in many ways, the stuff that my dad insisted on, he was just taking the best of what he had available there." "He had these guys that had this rapport and could generate this kind of energy." ""Let's do it." "Let's not be afraid of showing people who we really are."" "That's the nature of the art aspect." "DEJA:" "This whole sequence, again, animated by Ollie Johnston, who was just so good at these sensitive moments." "I keep mentioning Ollie Johnston in this, but Ollie animated so much of this movie." "He and Frank really animated half the film." "They did 50% of the footage." "That whole relationship between Baloo and Mowgli is really the work of Frank and Ollie." "Every time I've seen this movie," "I always hear one little kid asking his mom or dad," ""Is he dead, Mom?"" " Every time." " RICHARD:" "The set-up is so perfect." "And of course, it's raining, which gives you the extra tragedy of it." "DEJA:" "I like the way the eyes flutter first." "BRUCE:" "And the timing here, that he wakes up relatively early." "To my way of thinking, you could have kept him apparently dead for some time, but the audience gets to know." "DEJA:" "You want them in on the fun." "BRUCE:" "Relieved and on the fun side." "RICHARD:" "Of course." "BRUCE:" "There's almost a making fun of the Disney approach here, in a sense." "Here it's almost making fun of what you'd expect." "DEJA:" "I like the church organ." "BRUCE:" "Like there's a gothic cathedral in some of the backgrounds." "Dick, one of the things I think is storytelling genius about Jungle Book and how it differs from the Rudyard Kipling version, is that in the book, Mowgli returns to his mother." "And in The Jungle Book version, he's drawn into an adult world." "That's to me, the essence of his little arc through the movie." "He really grows up." "RICHARD:" "You're absolutely correct and that came into the story late." "We didn't have that." "We were doing segments, sections." "And about a year and a half after we started it, we started discussing, "How are we gonna end this thing?"" "A highly dramatic meeting took place." "We, meaning the collection of about 10 people in that room, we said, "How about the siren song of a..."" "I use the word "siren song" because it's a key word." ""But the siren song of a man's pull to a woman or a woman's pull to a man," ""that would pull him into the man-village."" "Then Walt said, "We'll have a little girl." ""And the girl's coming out of the village to get some water."" "And we said, "That's it." Then we had the fun of that whole flirtation." "DEJA:" "I talked to some of the animators about the ending, people like Milt Kahl, and he didn't think that was a good idea at all, the way this little girl lured this kid to the man-village." "The other animators weren't too crazy, either." "Walt said, "I'm gonna give it to Ollie Johnston to animate."" "And Ollie just had the right sensitivity and that touch to make that sequence really work." "But it had to be played just right from the animation." "Because it's a little sexy." "They're still kids." "If you don't handle this just right, it could be icky and a little strange, these two kids." "But they are at that age, and of course you have Ollie animating it." "BRUCE:" "Of all of the reasons to go back to the man-village, too, it gives Mowgli a place to go that isn't just buildings and noises." "It's people, it's this connection with his own kind that he can't get in the forest any more." "DEJA:" "And like you said earlier on, he grows up, because it's that interest that he all of a sudden develops, which doesn't make him be a kid any more." "BRUCE:" "Is he gonna stay a kid forever, and be a big bear like Baloo and live it up and eat pawpaws and ants for the rest of his life, or is he actually gonna grow up and become who he is destined to be?" "RICHARD:" "That's the thing." "The arc takes place with Mowgli." "Everybody else stays the same." "Nobody else reforms." "Shere Khan's still gonna be a predator." "Baloo's gonna be a jungle bum." "Everybody's gonna be the same except Mowgli." "Mowgli's gonna be a young man, then he's gonna be a grown man." "That was the necessary ingredient to make the whole show really work." "The miracle happened." "Ken Anderson was assigned to do the storyboards, and Bob and I were told to write that siren song for this ending." "So, Bob and I wrote My Own Home." "We actually wanted to write a song with an Indian flavour." " (PLAYING PIANO)" " The melody sprang out of discussions." "Then the idea of having the girl singing about her home, what it means to have a home." "So we envisioned in our mind a certain way of doing it." "Walt would never just settle for..." "He'd say, "What's happening while this song's going on?" ""I don't want to look at singing heads."" "One day coming back from lunch, we saw Ken." "We said, "Ken, we just finished a song for that ending." ""We'd like to play it for you."" "He says, "I just finished drawing the ending." ""I'd like to show you what I've got." So we went in there." "There were storyboards with exactly what was going to happen when the girl comes out of the village down to the well." "Then Mowgli spots her and he's sort of drawn to her." "And the whole..." "We were actually transfixed, because everything we had in our mind was exactly what he had drawn." "We were independent of each other." "We said, "Come upstairs."" "We took him upstairs and I played and sang My Own Home for the first time." "He had tears in his eyes." "He said, "This is impossible." "Were you watching my drawings?"" "We said, "No." The look-backs and everything was there." "So we had this meeting." "We said, "We think we have an ending."" "Walt says, "Let's see."" "He sits down, slumps down in the chair." "He says, "What have you got?" I sang it and Walt looked at it." ""Yeah, yeah, that'll work." "Let's do it."" "He got up and walked out and that was it." "Then everybody got assigned what to do and that's how it ended." "DEJA:" "There's a little story that goes with this." "Here's Ollie Johnston." "Ollie was trying to show his rough animation of the girl, his first scenes." "OLLIE:" "We came towards the end of the picture, as a matter of fact, it was the last meeting we ever had with Walt." "We have a little girl there, so you'd have a good way of getting Mowgli into the man-village, rather than him being forced in as we'd originally planned." "I thought that was a great idea." "I loved doing that little girl." "So in this last meeting," "Walt had come in to see my little girl I had done for the end of the picture." "But he had also come in to see the story sketch reel of the tiger sequence that Milt Kahl was gonna do." "Somewhere during that part of the meeting," "Milt and Walt got into some kind of argument about whether tigers could climb trees." "There were very few people that could argue with Walt." "Milt was one of the very few that could get away with it." "And Walt was getting kind of upset." "I think he was maybe on the wrong end of the argument." "Anyway, I kept trying to nudge Milt and tell him to please be quiet." ""Milt, don't get Walt all upset." ""He'll be in a bad mood to look at my little girl."" "But I couldn't stop him." "Once Milt gets going..." "Anyway, finally Walt says," ""Darn it all." "I came in here to see Ollie's little girl."" "He says, "Let's run that."" "I thought, "My God." "He's not gonna be in a good mood to see this."" "He looked at it and after he saw it, he says, "Gee, she's sexy."" "And so I felt real pleased with that." "That's the way it was." "BRUCE:" "This is Bruce." "It's been a pleasure." "DEJA:" "Hi, it's Andreas and I just had a blast listening to you two." "I'm probably Jungle Book's biggest fan." "RICHARD: (CHUCKLING) This is Richard and I want you to know that it's a great joy to be paying tribute to the great talents that worked on this show." "Thank you so much."