Mowgli Returns

Sethi is the only actor in The Jungle Book. The live-action movie, which releases in India on April 8, employs the latest technology to tell the story. It blends live action performances with stunning CG environments and extraordinary photo-real animal characters that artists have stylised. More explanation of how CGI has created grand spectacle in the movie came from Sethi. “For some scenes, I had to just jump from one blue-shaded platform to another.

On screen, it looks like a 400 ft leap. That’s really cool. When I first watched the scene, I thought, I am really cool. I really didn’t do that but it looks like (on screen) that I did it,” says the dimpled actor, at home with scores of cameras trained on him and mediapersons asking a volley of questions. Sethi was selected after an exhaustive worldwide search during which 2,000 children were auditioned.

The actor near Rudyard Kipling’s bunglow on JJ School of Art campus. Source: Express photo by Varinder Chawla

Sethi is in Mumbai to kick off a series of promotional events in the run up to the film’s India release in four languages — English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Even as plenty of buzz is building up around it, here is a dampener. The film was given a UA certificate by the Central Board of Film Certification. Responding to a question on why they did not contest the decision, Siddharth Roy Kapur, the MD and CEO of Disney India, said: “We wanted to retain the sanctity of the film and ensure that it doesn’t go through any cuts. For a ‘U’ certificate, we might have had to do that.

We figured that, with a UA certificate, children will be able to watch it with their parents.” Vishal Bhardwaj, who was present at the press conference, has already watched the movie and found it “beautiful”. “It does not require a UA certificate. There is nothing in it that is going to scare children,” he said, and added, “Let’s accept that these are times when The Jungle Book is given a UA certificate.”

Siddharth Roy Kapur, Neel Sethi and Vishal Bhardwaj

Bhardwaj’s association with The Jungle Book spans over two decades when Doordarshan used to telecast a Japanese anime version of it, dubbed in Hindi, on Sunday mornings in 1993. When the composer-director was struggling to find his foothold in the industry, he got a call from the lyricist-director Gulzar to compose the tune for the television series’s opening song. They had only a day to do that. Bhardwaj played a few tunes and Gulzar came up with the lines: Jungle jungle baat chali hai, pata chala hai, chaddi pahanke phool khila hai. For the upcoming film too Bhardwaj has teamed up with Gulzar to rework the iconic song.

The film is trying to tap into the overwhelming nostalgia that Indians experience over Rudyard Kipling’s classic that is set in the jungles of central India. The immensely popular television series too kept the nostalgia alive. As the voice of Shere Khan, Nana Patekar grabbed popular imagination in the ’90s. The veteran actor has once again been roped in to lend his voice to Favreau’s The Jungle Book along with Irrfan as Baloo, Om Puri as Bageera, Priyanka Chopra as Ka and Shefali Shah as Raksha. “We wanted to cast known voices as these characters are really popular in India. We had first, second and third choices. Fortunately, all our first choices agreed to do it,” says Roy Kapoor.