Like a lot of the company's 1960s and '70s output, it was relaxed to a fault—a succession of beautifully rendered, mostly jokey set-pieces strung together by memorable songs, including 'The Bare Necessities,' 'I Wanna Be Like You' and the python’s seduction song 'Trust in Me'—but it still made a deep impression on '60s and '70s kids like the 49-year-old Favreau. This incarnation is a more straightforward telling that includes just two brief, according-to-Hoyle musical numbers, 'The Bare Necessities' and 'I Wanna Be Like You'—performed by Sethi with Murray and Walken, respectively.
It relegates a longer version of the ape's song and a torch-song-y version of 'Trust in Me,' performed by Johansson, to the approximately seven-minute end credits sequence, which is so intricately imagined as to be worth the ticket price by itself. Other numbers, including the elephants' marching song and 'That's What Friends Are For,' performed by a barbershop quartet of mop-topped vultures, are MIA, presumably in the interest of pacing. I mention all this not because I consider the film's lack of music a shortcoming, but because it gives some indication of how gracefully this 'Jungle Book' juggles the competing interests of parents and kids. Musically, visually and tonally, there are enough nods to the 1967 version to satisfy nostalgia buffs, but not so many that the film becomes a glorified rehash.