(By Scott Roxborough,
Hollywood Reporter, 22 April 2016)
Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book did great in Germany on its
opening weekend, pulling in $5.6 million on 655 screens with nearly half a
million tickets sold, the best opening for one of Disney's classic reboots here
since 2010's Alice in Wonderland. The film has grossed a total of $6.3 million
in the territory so far. But the new
Jungle Book has a way to go if it's to catch Disney's 1967 original in the
country. The first Jungle Book, directed
by Wolfgang Reitherman, is not just the most successful animation film in Germany.
It's not just Disney's biggest-ever release in the country. In Germany, The
Jungle Book (1967) is the biggest movie of all time.
Germans have bought 27.3 million tickets to watch the
original Jungle Book in theaters, nearly 10 million, by admissions, more than
Titanic, the second-most successful film here with 18.8 million tickets sold.
Avatar is a distant third with 11.3 million. More than three times as many
Germans have seen The Jungle Book in theaters than Disney's Star Wars: Episode
VII – The Force Awakens, which sold fewer than 9 million tickets here. Outside
the United States, (around 62 million tickets sold), nowhere has The Jungle
Book done better.
German film statistics from the 1960s did not track
box-office results, so it's impossible to make a direct comparison with later
films but given the gap in ticket sales, and taking inflation into account,
it's a safe bet The Jungle Book is the country's number one earner as well. The film's amazing teutonic success story is
attributable to talent and lucky timing, and of a group of irreverent German
musicians and cabaret artists who freely adapted the original Disney songs to
suit their generation.
It is, most of all, the story of Heinrich Riethmuller, the
German composer and music producer who, after producing the German dub work for
Disney's Mary Poppins in 1964, got offered the Jungle Book gig. For the first
time, Riethmuller had full control: he wrote the German translation, adapted
the film's songs and directed the dubbed version of the film. “I don't tend to like dubbed versions, I
prefer the originals, but in this case, in this one case, the German version is
better,” says Daniel Kothenschulte, film critic for the Frankfurter Rundschau
and one of the leading experts on animation film in Germany. “Riethmuller makes
the song lyrics to The Jungle Book better than they actually were.”
Take, for example, Baloo's signature song: "The Bare
Necessities." Riethmuller's German version, "Probiers mal mit
Gemutlichkeit" (or, roughly translated, Try Taking it Easy), changes the
original meaning, from “be satisfied with the simple things in life” to “chill
out and you'll be happy.” “The original
version, by the American folk singer Terry Gilkyson, has a pretty conservative
message, when you think of it, of making due with less,” says Kothenschulte.
“Riethmuller's lyrics are more liberal and positive, they promise both freedom
and comfort, the jungle as a sort of boundless utopia.”
It also helped that Riethmuller assembled a team of
exceptional voiceover talents, many of them artists in their own right. Klaus
Havenstein, who voiced King Louie, was a founding member of the pioneering
German cabaret troupe Munchen Lach- und Schießgesellschaft. Edgar Ott, the
voice of Baloo, was arguably the most famous voice in German children's films.
In addition to the Jungle Book, he lent his dulcet tones to French cartoon hero
Obelix and German animated elephant Benjamin Blumchen, as well as voicing
several Disney productions, among them voicing the lead in Robin Hood (1973) and
King Triton in the Little Mermaid (1989).
Before The Jungle Book, U.S. films tended to be dubbed into
serious high German, with an emphasis on correct, received pronunciation.
Riethmuller's translation, and his troupe's voiceover performances, embraced slang
and local dialect, as well as irreverent humor. When The Jungle Book was
released in West Germany on Dec. 13, 1968 (Disney took a full year to do the
local version), this style was perfectly in tune with the country's swelling
hippie counterculture. A generation of young Germans, many now with young kids
of their own, were rejecting their parents' strict authoritarian ways.
The Jungle Book also filled a void in the German theatrical
market, which in the late 1960s was dominated by adult fare, including a lot of
low-budget, homegrown soft porn. Disney had a virtual monopoly on
family-friendly films. In 1968, The Jungle Book was just about the only film in
German theaters the whole family could enjoy.
Those baby boomers turned out in droves, making Jungle Book a hit. They
did so again in 1979, and 1987, and 1993, and 2000, as Disney re-released the
film in Germany.
The film has had a lasting impact on German film culture. In
2003, it was the only animated film included in list of 35 titles chosen by
German filmmakers, critics, historians and educators to be part of an official
film canon to be used by German schools and universities. Alongside other films
in the canon —among them Shoah, Taxi Driver, Vertigo and Fritz Lang's M—The
Jungle Book stands out. “There's no child who doesn't immediately love
Baloo, who doesn't grin watching the vain (elephant) Colonel Hathis or
recognize British colonial posturing behind Shir Khan's slippery snobbery,”
wrote film critic Cristina Moles Kaupp in her official defense for including
the film in the cannon. “Even now, The Jungle Book enchants...the young with
its dazzling colors and simple plot, grown-ups with the wonderful songs and
phenomenal characters, which let one see past the film's many antiquated
clichés, including its depiction of women. ”
Disney was so impressed by the German version of The Jungle
Book, it hired Riethmuller to rework the dubbed version of previous releases,
including Bambi, Dumbo, Pinocchio, The Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians,
all of which were successfully re-released in German in the 1970s and 1980s. (A
footnote to The Jungle Book's German success: the film's director, Wolfgang
Reitherman, who also helmed 101 Dalmatians, Aristocats and Robin Hood, was
himself German, born in Munich in 1909).
Kothenschulte argues those Disney films, adapted by Riethmuller, set the
template for what works in Germany when it comes to animated movies. “Light, funny stories with talking animals,
that's basically what works here. Animation for grown-ups, or anything too
dark, has a hard time,” he says. “German audiences just want The Jungle Book,
over and over again.”
Even the original has lost little of its appeal. The Jungle
Book had its free-TV premiere in Germany only in 2014, 46 years after its
original release. It drew 5.3 million viewers, a phenomenal 16.1 percent of the
viewing audience. Ironically, all that
could work against Favreau's new Jungle Book in Germany. Kothenschulte is one of many German critics
who took the 2016 film to task for being significantly different, and
significantly darker, than the 1967 version, suggesting that could turn off
German families with young children. The
new film is still a hit but, in Germany at least, it won't be replacing the
original as king of the jungle anytime soon.
