This film would have been far more interesting if the focus had been on village life and Mowgli trying to adjust and fit in. (We found an old black-and-white Jungle Book film from the thirties that was just that — Mowgli trying to live with humans after having been raised by jungle animals.)

It would have made more sense, for example, to show the interactions of Shanti and another girl (who would logically been more self-assured than Mowgli since they were raised in the village and know how everything works), and Mowgli trying to figure things out and fit in. As it is — even though he’s supposed to have been there only a few days at the beginning of the film — he’s perfectly integrated socially with the other kids, leading them out into the jungle and arranging a prank with another boy to scare Shanti by pretending to be a tiger.

I think the main problem, though, is that this is very much a made-for-DVD-sequel. There were probably writers on the project who wanted to focus on the village situation, but that would have meant a lot of costly new animations and original scenes. The idea of this movie is to get Mowgli back out into the jungle pronto so that they can recycle all of the jungle-animal characters from the original movie.

But I thought of a trick they could have used to deal with that constraint: two female characters.

But … but … how?

If it is meant to Mowgli’s story, wouldn’t it have been better to put his fear front and centre? Afraid of the village, of other humans; Shanti could be a focus for that fear, or someone he clings to to shield himself from it. And if he does – as I presume – choose the jungle, then perhaps he has to conquer his fear of the village before he can properly choose the jungle for the jungle’s sake.

The story is a standard formula: Mowgli thinks he wants one thing and and has to learn that really he wants something else. Shanti represents the draw of living in the human village and Baloo (the bear) represents the draw of the jungle.

The first song they cut (“I’ve Got You Beat”) gave the opportunity to contrast his two choices, and from the storyboards you can see a lot of rich detail about village life including a bustling marketplace. The song was replaced with the song “Jungle Rhythm,” which — thematically — is just “I’ve Got You Beat” with Shanti’s half of the duet cut off. Without Shanti singing about the village rhythm, the lively village scenes weren’t relevant, so they shifted the focus to having the children of the village dressing up in cheesy jungle-animal costumes. As a result, village life looks far more limited and less colorful, and when Mowgli goes back to the village in the end, it’s more like an obligation than a choice.

Since they decided not to focus on developing the Shanti character, I think it might have been a better movie if they’d stuck with the original idea of portraying her as someone to be reckoned with from the beginning. From some things some others said in other parts of the bonus material, it looks like they felt constrained to have her start out demure because of the fact that the little girl who leads Mowgli into the village in the end of the original Jungle Book seems very demure. But I thought of a trick they could have used to deal with that constraint: two female characters.

I know, call me a radical…

They couch it in what sounds like legitimate, academic reasoning, but that’s all they’re ever really saying. And when you argue with them as long as I did, they finally admit that yeah, that’s what they’re saying, and if you don’t want to rewrite a script the way you’re being told, your future bosses will just hire someone else because writers have no power in the industry whatsoever.

And that’s why I quit before I’d really made an effort to sell a script. I knew what was going to happen, and I was just too “oversensitive” to sell out my gender one more time.

I’m assuming you’ve watched the movie (which I haven’t) – does the character Shanti come out pretty well in the final cut? Or has she been pared down to as much of a timid, second-string personality as this dialogue seems to intimate?