The Jungle Book: Return 2 the Jungle is not a complete mess and deserves to stand on its own, but on the most part it is pretty lame.
Starting with the good points, the music is quite good, with a catchy main theme and very energetic and beautifully orchestrated incidental music that doesn't overbear the atmosphere and the tense parts are scored appropriately. A better job generally could have been done with the characters, but Shere Khan comes off very well, he is an effectively sinister villain. Credit should be given too for the film showing some good values and how to get out of tight situations in a way that don't seem too questionable. A couple of the voice actors come off well too, especially David Holt, who is suitably menacing as Shere Khan, and Jimmy Hibbert as a kindly and fun Baloo.
Emma Tate voices enthusiastically, but in the more tense moments it comes over as too over-eager and cocky, which comes off annoying and in need of more subtlety. The rest of the voice cast suffer from having characters that are obnoxious and sometimes useless, like the monkeys, or blandly written, as nice as it was to see the wolves more prominent little is done with making them interesting or distinct from one another. Kaa barely appears, and Bagheera- a lenient but flatly written character- is voiced too softly and it's sometimes hard to tell whether Bagheera's meant to be male or female.
Where The Jungle Book: Return 2 the Jungle primarily falls down is in the animation, the quality would have been forgivable if this was computer animation in its early days but seeing as computer animation has come on a good deal, there was no excuse for the animation to look this cheap. Backgrounds are blocky and lack richness in detail, the colours are very flat but it's the very stiff and quite ugly character designs that come off the worst. The story has a very episodic feel with the feeling of five or six TV episodes strung together, it's also devoid of charm, humour feels simplistically juvenile and the more tense parts are hampered by lack of suspense and a large degree of predictability. Dialogue is flat, first-draft-like and constantly sounds like it's trying too hard to appeal to kids, that adults will find little of value, and while the film is short the flagging energy and lack of detail to characterisation and story makes the film feel longer than it is.
Overall, has its moments but is pretty lame on the most part. 3/10 Bethany Cox
