The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story (1998)

Bad watch, won't watch again, and can't recommend, even for younger audiences.

Maybe kids won't see all the faults, but that's more the reason not to recommend it for them.

To be fair, working with animals is hard (and inadvisable) as they have no natural instinct to do anything you'd want to do with them.

I honestly can't tell if the kid was a decent actor because the majority of his live action (non voice over / narrative) lines were pretty garbage and / or between animals that clearly weren't talking back at the time.

Most of the voice over work for the animals wasn't good, I feel like they weren't told the animals or situations they were in. Even the voices I recognized and like the actors felt disconnected from the story.

This was also a really strange mix of animals. This is set in India. As a nature fan, I can tell that there were a lot North American animals, and South American birds. It's one thing when you're drawing whatever you want, but when you get animals for a setting it's distracting when they don't look like they belong there. I think they even switched Leopards, as the eyes changed from blue to green. Chimps and Hyenas are only native to Africa so added them when they weren't part of the original story didn't make any sense.

The gender swapping didn't bother me as much, but making Bagera and Baloo a psuedo-couple was a bit odd, and they could have been two gay dads for just as much sense. The "Two Men and a Baby" vibe was a lot more intuitive. Appropriating the wrong sexed voice to the animals was distracting though. It would be different if they established a character to be transgender, but it was very clear they thought little enough of the audience to notice.

Also, since this isn't animation, the animals don't convey the emotion or delivery that gives the original its charm. They also leave out the song and dance aspect, for which the original is famous.

The writing itself was by far the worst. Bad single lines aside, having Mowgli take over narration and assertion in the story were both mistakes. Being old enough to be a human BEFORE living life in the Jungle not only takes away his cuteness factor for the believability of the animals to want to raise him would also dissuade him from staying in the Jungle to begin, at least long enough to learn "wolf". And at every turn where I thought it might just get a little better, Mowgli has full control of the situation and does something silly.

Maybe knowledge is a curse, but I really think, if I could suspend my disbelief long enough, this would still be a bad movie no matter how you present it.