This is the true story of the "Jungle Book" star

Faithfulness can be a strength of literary adaptations - or their greatest weakness. The story of the Indian foundling Mowgli (sometimes also spelled Mowgli) shows this as clearly as perhaps no other example. While the animated version by the Soviet director Roman Dawydow, which is based closely on the original by the British writer Rudyard Kipling, is only known to experts in this country, almost every German should know the Disney Studios version, which is only vaguely inspired by the original. But at least some pictures from it or the song "Try it with comfort".

It's about The Jungle Book, which was released in US theaters on October 18, 1967. Incidentally, the same year in which the first of a total of five short films from the USSR was released for the first time. However, Mowgli was already 74 years old, because Kipling (1865 to 1936) had already invented what is probably his best-known character in 1893, for his almost 10,000-word story "In the Rukh" (roughly: "In the forest").

In this text a certain Gisborne, a British forest officer in India (where Kipling himself was born the son of a British sculptor and professor in Bombay) happens to make an unusual acquaintance: "A man was walking down the dried-up creek bed, naked save for his loincloth", Kipling wrote, continuing, "So silently did he move over the small pebbles that even Gisborne, accustomed to the soft-footedness of trackers, was startled."

The forest ranger quickly realizes that the young man has extraordinary abilities: he moves naturally in the jungle, can hunt and recognizes the tracks of almost every animal. Gisborne asks him to join the British Forest Service. Finally, he learns the story of his new employee.

Mowgli grew up in the forest, raised by a pack of wolves. Because he has been walking on all fours for many years, his elbows and knees are calloused. But when he grows up, this coexistence ends: "I was none the less a wolf among wolves, until a time came when the denizens of the jungle bade me go, because I had become a man." Indeed, Mowgli prefers, quite the contrary to his pack "cooked food". So he goes in search of other people and comes across Gisborne and his butler Abdul Gafur. "In the Rukh" ends with Mowgli and the butler's daughter in the jungle falling in love.

Rudyard Kipling described the genesis of this story almost metaphysically: "Then my pen took over and I watched him start writing stories about Mowgli and the beasts." made the main character of eight other short stories. They first appeared in magazines from 1893 to 1895 and then in two anthologies entitled "The Jungle Book" and "The Second Jungle Book".

At the time, Kipling was not based in India or the UK, but in the US state of Vermont on the east coast. It was the four most productive years of his career, and Mowgli became his best-known creation.

The motif of the child being raised by wild animals is ancient: it already occurs in the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and in the founding myth of Rome about the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus, who are rescued by a she-wolf.

In 1879, the French writer Albert Robida wrote about the "Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul", an orphan boy who was raised by orangutans in the jungle and eventually became the "King of the Apes". Ten years later, British author Henry Rider Haggard created the girl Hendrika, daughter of Boers in southern Africa who was kidnapped and raised by baboons.

So the character Mowgli was hardly an innovation. But Kipling's language and the structure of his stories meant that his invented foundling became the best-known such character in world literature.

The first film adaptation of the "Jungle Book" (with actors) was made in Hollywood in 1942, directed by Zoltan Korda. A graphic novel of the same name from 1959, on the other hand, only had the title in common with Kipling's story.

Illustrator Bill Peet picked up the material for the Disney Studios. But he fell out with the studio boss over the specific design: Peet wanted to follow the rather dark and dramatic tone of Kipling's book; Disney favored a light musical version. Added to this was a wealth of funny ideas; the vultures were designed in the style of the Beatles, including their typical hairstyles. The attempt to get the Fab Four to speak was reportedly thwarted by John Lennon's objection. In return, the four got a Liverpool accent in the American original.

Wherever Disney's "Jungle Book" hit theaters, it was a hit. But nowhere did the film hit more than in Germany. Because the dubbing director Heinrich Riethmüller created ingenious translations in wit and cheerfulness. The following really applies here: The German version is (even) better than the original: "Try it with comfort..."

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