It would be a great challenge for director Jon Favreau to bring to life the animals found in Disney's live movie adaptation of "The Jungle Book," and many are curious to see if the animals would be portrayed realistically or with certain fantastical modifications.
During an interview with Collider, Favreau discussed his plans concerning the movie and its characters
"What creating the world allows us to do is exaggerate proportions and scale. So the jungle is slightly heightened," he shared. "The animals are slightly heightened. And we have we're not forced into tying into a real tiger as they would be like Life of Pi where half the shots are real and half are fake."
One of the challenges they faced was that the character of Christopher Walken - which is King Louie the orang-utan cannot be found in India, where they filmed.
"But we liked that it was a character invented by Walt (Disney). We had an interesting take on him," Favreau revealed. "There's a creature called the Gigantopitchecus, which is kind of a Missing Link slash Yeti type creature that's of legend in the jungles of India. And so we used that as inspiration because that had somewhat orangutan like features. And we exaggerated the size even more, so he's really big and allows for again, just playing with scale. Because you have tiny creatures down to insect size, all the way up to King Louie and the elephants that are enormous."
As for Bill Murray's beloved bear Baloo, who is the best friend of Mowgli (Neel Sethi), the larger-than-life character will be voiced by Bill Murray.
Favreau gushed about the many talents of the actor, and he believes in Murray's talent so much so that he gave him as much freedom to portray the character as he could afford.
"When you have Bill Murray, you want him to do his thing. You don't want him to move his mouth like a bear, you know. So I think that that's gonna be, that's always been the most challenging aspect of this, 'cause you don't wanna break the anatomy of it. We find subtlety is probably better than overly enunciating things," he said.
Other voice actors included in the film are Scarlett Johansson (Kaa), Idris Elba (Shere Khan), Ben Kingsley (Bagheera), Lupita Nyong'o (Raksha), and Giancarlo Eposito (Akela).
"The Jungle Book" will be released in cinemas on April 15, 2016.
