Disney opens the vaults to go behind-the-scenes of the brand new Jungle Book DVD.
To Celebrate the 40th Anniversary Special Edition of The Jungle Book on DVD, Disney offered a rare opportunity to tour its hollowed vaults in Glendale, California.
Walt Disney gave birth to the modern animated feature as we know it with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Naysayers said no one would want to watch a feature-length cartoon, but then again, there had never before seen a cartoon quite like Snow White. Walt would go on to supervise an almost endless string of classics over the next 30 years that would include Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland and a host of others that would live on as timeless classics of the genre. Walt Disney’s final animated feature work as producer came with 1967’s The Jungle Book, a fitting swan song for one of the greatest figures in the history of animation.
The Jungle Book quickley attained classic status and would go on to serve as a major inspiration for a new generation of animators who still cite the work as an influence.
As part of the celebration surrounding the 40th anniversary of The Jungle Book, Disney has gone to great lengths to pull together one of the most lavish and complete editions of its acclaimed Platinum series of DVDs. The Jungle Book has been remastered to as close to (if not even possibly superior to) the way it looks when it was originally seen in theaters. To say it looks exceptional would be an understatement. The Jungle Book has never looked or sounded this good, at least not in my lifetime.
Besides simply remastering the disc, Disney scoured their vaults for any and all remaining artifacts pertaining to the Jungle Book production, from original concept art to story sketches, scripts and even character models - much of which is included on this on the 2-disc DVD set.
The release prompted the mouse house to invite journalists into these hollowed vaults for a rare opportunity to explore the almost cavernous depths that house related artwork and the like for so many of the great Disney masterpieces.
Our guide for the tour was Doug Engalla who is a researcher in the Animation Research Library. To begin, we were shown a series of conceptual drawings and animation sketches related to The Jungle Book, including the infamous missing character, Rocky the Rhino, who Walt Disney himself removed from the film. “It just wasn’t working in the context of the story,” Engalla told us. “I also heard a rumor that Walt thought Frank Fontaine’s voice was a bit irritating…” The remaining footage of Rocky is included as a special feature on the new DVD.
Next we are shown some pencil background sketches. An amazing 2,000 of these backgrounds are created for each animated feature.
Despite the vast skill and time that went in to each of these drawings, most are unsigned and there are no records to indicate who the original artist was. “Walt Disney in his day would not allow artists to sign work… The studio had this identity and Disney himself, like P.T. Barnum in a sense, was the presenter. It wasn’t until a little bit later, possibly after his death, that there was more recognition for the artists that worked on these films…”
Now it’s time to go into an actual vault. This one is filled with glass cases that house maquettes (models of the characters used a reference tool for animators) from a vast array of Disney movies – primarily from the past two decades. The room is frigid - climate controlled to keep the maquettes in pristine condition. The maquettes are encased in plexiglass, some of which are covered to keep them out of light. There are characters from Aladdin, The Humpback of Notre Dame, The Lion King and Tarzan. A small case towards the front houses the few vintage pieces in the room, primarily from Pinocchio. Perhaps the coolest find within this vault are the original characters from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. These are the actual puppets used in the movie. One case contains two rows of Jack Skellington heads, which were changed out constantly for each and every consonant and vowel Jack utters in the movie. Engalla tells us that the development art of Nightmare Before Christmas will be on display at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood for the 3-D release this month.
There are nine of these climate-controlled vaults in which the lights are even wrapped in U.V. filtration systems. The next vault contains a series of compact shelving units which slide open in order to store more shelving units in each room. There are a dozen or more shelving units in each vault, each containing an astounding two to three tons of material.
Every Disney film you can think of is named within these vaults, included the seemingly forgotten 1946 film Song of the South, whose controversy has unfortunately overtaken the fact that it is a classic film many of us fondly remember seeing as kids. We’ll see if it ever makes it to DVD.
The Disney vaults house a simply mind-blowing variety of material (they approximate it at around 65 million pieces), much of which has been in storage since the original productions. Other original material is entered into the vault all the time via private collections or even, in some cases, random discoveries of previously unknown materials housed in a warehouse or even given to the vault by a collector.
After the tour, we were given an inside look into the making of the DVD. Theo Gluck, the Director of Library Restoration, shows us a side-by-side comparison of the past Jungle Book DVD with the new 40th Anniversary edition. The new images cleaner and brighter, almost making the old DVD look like a grainy VHS copy by comparison. He explains the painstaking process in which every single frame of the original film was individually scanned into their computers and literally cleaned up pixel by pixel.
Andy Siditsky, Senior VP of DVD Production, goes over the special feature of the DVD – a list almost too large to name here. There is the Rocky the Rhino omitted scene previously mentioned, a new music video featuring the current Disney “It” boys, The Jonas Brothers (check out our exclusive interview with the Jonas boys here), deleted songs and a documentary that chronicles Walt Disney’s touches on the original Rudyard Kipling story. For the kids, there are four games and a DisneyPedia feature which shows kids the real-life versions of the animals seen in The Jungle Book.
Bruce Reitherman, the voice of Mowgli and the son of Jungle Book’s director, Wolfgang Reitherman, also joined us for a short chat. Reitherman was raised within the Disney family and has gone on to his own impressive career as a nature documentarian. His father took the reigns at Disney after the passing of Walt during a time when the studio was beginning to question whether the costly animated features would continue. “When Jungle Book made some money,” says Reitherman “It was a tremendous relief and then the next movie that came out of the studio, The Aristocrats which my dad directed, made quite a lot of money, it saved their goose… For whatever reason, they were thinking about going in a direction that left animation in the dust.”
Thankfully, the Disney animated feature has continued for forty more years since The Jungle Book and a number of classics have been added to the vaults. Now that Pixar’s John Lasseter has taken the reigns, don’t expect hand-drawn animation to disappear. Lasseter has already confirmed his commitment to produce traditional animation along with the kind of computer generated material Pixar invented. For Engalla, the main change he’s seen under Lasseter so far is “There are definitely a lot more tours.”
The Jungle Book 40th Anniversary Platinum Edition is now available for a limited time before it is sealed once again in the Disney Vaults.