I'm sorry, that's a fairly trivial way to sum up the film's plot but then, the plot is, itself, trivial. Everybody dicks around in the jungle for about 45 minutes, and then the humans return. In the general mayhem that comes from this, Baloo and Mowgli flee into the jungle, leaving Shanti and Mowgli's adopted little brother Ranjan (Connor Funk) to chase after him. Meanwhile, in the jungle, Baloo the bear (John Goodman) is desperately missing his 'Little Britches' and so one night he sneaks into the village to meet up with Mowgli this is, unfortunately for all, the same night that murderous tiger Shere Khan (Tony Jay) also sneaks in, to get his bloody revenge on the boy. And oh! he does fantasise about returning to the jungle, but the love of his kindly adopted father (John Rhys-Davies) and the smoldering eyes of the girl who first seduced him to the village, Shanti (Mae Whitman) hold him in check. Sometime very soon after the end of the 1967 The Jungle Book (the timeline is left purposefully vague, but it surely can't be more than a month or so), the human boy Mowgli (Haley Joel Osment), raised by wolves and delivered to a man-village by a black panther and a sloth bear, is finding it hard to fit in. Way better than I'd have ever expected, certainly.' Whereas those of us who have spent some time fighting in the DTV trenches might not actually see this as the unspeakable nadir of American animation as a matter of fact, my first thought about the quality of the film was not, 'This is burning my retinas with the unbridled flame of its hate', but, 'Wow, this looks pretty darn good. If I were inclined towards cruelty and mocking humor, I'd suggest that this shift was the result of an attempt to keep the DisneyToon films (see how much easier it already is to talk about them?) away from the harsh eyes of proper film critics for The Jungle Book 2, upon its release, was met with the kind of reviews usually reserved for the most deeply unsettling torture porn.

Befitting this status, The Jungle Book 2 was also a direct-to-video cash-in given a theatrical release, in February of 2003 only the second of these sequels to bear that distinction, after the previous year's Return to Never Land, and the last one to date. Thank God, I finally get to stop using cumbersome sentence constructions involving the phrase 'Walt Disney Television Animation', because unless I am terribly mistaken, The Jungle Book 2 was the first production made by the newly rechristened DisneyToon Studios, a rebranding of the Burbank, Sydney, and Tokyo animation facilities meant, I imagine, to lay a patina of respectability over direct-to-video cash-ins that seemed much less tawdry when the word 'television' was taken out of the equation.

Jungle book 2 mowgli