Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
Walt Disney Animation was about to face quite a challenge ahead. The Jungle Book was put in…
Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
Walt Disney Animation was about to face quite a challenge ahead. The Jungle Book was put into production around 1965, with Ken Anderson's story treatment as the basis for the film. Based on Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name, the film took a consistent narrative compared to episodic interstitials that made up the book. Most of the crew haven't even read the book, one time Walt Disney asked the story crew, "How many of you read The Jungle Book?" none of them raised their hands. As consistent with many Disney adaptations, Disney took a rather dark source material and turned it into something more lighthearted.
Being on a schedule that now limited animated features to one every four years, Walt Disney focused much of his precious time on his big Florida project, which would become Disney World. Unfortunately, his health was deteriorating. During filming where he was explaining about Epcot, he had to have one of those health asthma things in between the takes. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston somehow managed to animate half the movie themselves. As for Richard and Robert Sherman, they wrote such classic songs for the movie that they ought to be commended for The Bare Necessities. With both of these groups of people, they visited Walt Disney to get some ideas for how they were going to take on The Jungle Book, but they noticed that Walt was not quite feeling himself. Would it have been too much to get as much additional input from such a great master as possible. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, because on December 15, 1966, Walter Elias Disney, family entertainment icon and American folk hero, died at age 65 of lung cancer. The papers were full of it. Rumors floated around that Walt was cryogenically frozen and placed under the pirate ship at Disneyland so he can later be thawed out at a point in the future. I never ..
