Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 25

Racism in Walt Disney’s
The Jungle Book
Many differences exist between Disney's widely acclaimed movie
The Jungle Book (1967) and its source, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle
Books (1894). Although the film adaptation retains many of the
same characters, Disney significantly departs from Kipling by
endowing those characters in many instances with modern ethnic
identities suggested by a broad range of identifiably American and
English accents, dialects, behaviors, and such. In effect, Disney
transforms Kipling's story of East Indian jungle society into an
allegory of modem English and American ethnicity, whose dynamics
Mowgli must be initiated into as part of his coming of age. Disney
does not, of course, depart from his source in depicting a classist
society: from Kipling he borrowed a rigid caste system in which the
monkeys, otherwise known as the Bandar-log, are held in universal
contempt by all of the other jungle animals. However, nowhere in
Kipling are the monkeys portrayed as African-Americans.^
Surprisingly, no one has yet examined the film in terms of its
disturbingly racist subtext (even though it has been criticized for
various technical faults and even in one instance for its obviously
sexist conclusion).^ This essay will argue that Disney's The Jungle
Book latently reflects and perpetuates racist ideology.
The monkeys and their leader, the orangutan King Louie, are
identified as African-American by a clear and consi stent pattern of
traits. Indeed, "monkeys" is itself such a common stereotype for
African-Americans that the metaphorical association of the two in
this film cannot be accidental. Equally telling is the fact that
Kipling's monkeys, although typically lawless (34-35), "senseless"
(36), "chattering" (42), "foolish" (42), "evil" (35), "dirty" (35),
"shameless" (35), and song-and-dance-loving social outcasts (36, 45),
nevertheless do not sing and dance to jazz, which is a quintessentially
African-American art form. Nor do they employ certain slang
expressions such as, "Lay it on me," "Cool it," and "C-r-a-z-y," that
have their origin in so-called black English.^
Other traits added by Disney reinforce this association of King
Louie and the monkeys with African-Americans. For one thing, the
name of King Louie-a character who is entirely absent from Kipling's