#19 The Jungle Book

The last film produced during Walt Disney's lifetime, The Jungle Book is a worthy end to Disney's Silver Age. There's no trace of the animation and plotting problems that plagued The Sword in the Stone; The Jungle Book instead proves to be a fitting return to form.

The animation style is more polished here than in the previous two films, refining the xerography style with less visible pencil lines and an overall cleaner aesthetic. The backgrounds, meanwhile, are illustratively painted, capturing the various environs of the jungle, from river to wasteland to the monkeys' temple. The script, not usually the most notable part of Disney films, stands out here, filled with snappy and snarky dialogue. The songs are doubtlessly the best of the entire Silver Age: "The Bare Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You" carry an upbeat swing style, "That's What Friends Are For" is a fusion between barbershop and a Beatles track, and Kaa's sinister number "Trust In Me" perfectly encapsulates the character.

And speaking of character, the entire cast of The Jungle Book are characterized and acted to perfection, with not a single weak link. In addition to the leads, Mowgli, Baloo, and Bagheera, there's Colonel Hathi, the elephant with the sensibilities of a blustering British imperial commander; Kaa, the iconically slippery and frequently abused python; King Louie, the swing-jazz styled orangutan voiced by Louis Prima (there could probably be something said about the characterization of the monkeys as African-American swing types, but it's really not mean-spirited or detracting from the film); the vultures, originally intended to be voiced by the Beatles and clearly modeled after them; and Shere Khan, voiced by George Sands as a perfect smooth-voiced British villain, sophisticated yet menacing.

With the end of Walt Disney's life, so too ended the Silver Age of Disney. The next two decades would prove to be an uneven period for the studio, producing some good films and some less so, before they would finally recapture the spirit of the Golden and Silver Ages with the Disney Renaissance.