Last year, Iron Man director Jon Favreau, joined forces with Disney to create one of the year’s most enchanting live-action movies with the newest version of The Jungle Book. It set standards high and expectations even higher for any production wishing to follow in its extremely large footsteps – even Disney’s own forthcoming offerings.
Related: Jon Favreau on making the CG world possible
Visually, the whole production was a vision of precision which saw the animals, voiced by an all-star cast which included Bill Murray as Mowgli’s best friend, Baloo the Bear, Ben Kingsley as Bagheera the panther, Idris Elba as villainous tiger Shere Khan and Scarlett Johansson as Paa the Python, seem effortlessly real – We have to tip our hats and bow down to the real stars behind what made The Jungle Book a glorious winner with their 2017 Oscar win for Best Visual Effects – Lead VFX studio MPC and its artists, which, without, this whole film would not exist.
With that in mind, we wanted to bring to your attention the hard work and skill that went into building such an immersive, beautiful world of pure escapist adventure from the team behind the incredible VFX, MPC. In the below video, MPC breakdown scenes from the film in its finished form to the bare bones of the animals via computer animation. We see the building of the vast landscapes, and we are also indulged with the sight of the young Neel Sethi, who played our boy protagonist Mowgli, acting out his scenes in front of the green screen where the computer animation was later added.
Related: Go behind the scenes on The Jungle Book
An unimaginable amount of painstaking hours must off gone into bringing to life the film’s iconic animals. 54 species of animals and 224 unique animals were created and new computer programs were made to better simulate muscles, skin and fur, which, during the video, we are shown how each slight muscle movement was made, now that is what we call patience.
We can’t help but have a whole new appreciation of the unsung heroes who bring to life our much-loved movies.
