Disney's 1967 animated film, The Jungle Book, is an artifact from a past cultural period in the United States. As with many cultures, the particular expressions, including deviance, of society are articulated through art. By using The Jungle Book as an art artifact, a cultural anthropologist may be able to discern certain details of past American society. Within the cinematic experience, the viewer can glimpse biases and social mores that are no longer pieces of the dominant paradigm. Race, class, and gender are displayed prominently in The Jungle Book in a manner to reinforce established values and taboos.
Disney's animated version of The Jungle Book is loosely based on a series of Nineteenth Century tales written by British author Rudyard Kipling. However, the similarities are surface and the two stories share little of their cultural perspectives. Both legends are based on the character of Mowgli, a human child raised in the jungles of India by wolves. Other characters that appear as part of both stories are Bagheera the panther, Baloo the sloth bear, Shere Khan the tiger, and Kaa the python. Both relate Mowgli's travel to a human village, but from this point the stories diverge sufficiently to abandon comparison to Kipling's creation and focus only on the American cultural elements of Disney's movie.
One of the defining characteristics of The Jungle Book is the embedded xenophobia in the story. The use of foreign accents, for example, reveals a cultural anxiety regarding people of foreign origins. In general, the characters all speak in a well-modulated intonation, perhaps an eastern North American, educated accent. However, those individuals, such as Shere Khan and Colonel Hathi, which require a singular status to build on social biases are given an even more pronounced accent. By distinguishing between types of animals by establishing an accent, in this case British, ethnocentrism can be renewed. In both cases, also, the accent provides a buffer against validating alternate cultural points of view.
A specific element of American xenophobia is racial discrimination. A major theme of The Jungle Book is the implied conflict between man and the animals of the jungle. Bagheera repeats the phrase "bird of a feather must flock together" as an idiom to explain why Mowgli must leave the jungle and join human society. The character uses the phrase most prominently in a conversation with Baloo the bear. When Baloo protests Mowgli returning to the "man-village" and states his desire to raise the human as a bear-cub, Bagheera states flatly that the bear cannot raise Mowgli; the panther explains that Baloo must accept being separated from Mowgli and then asks the bear, "You wouldn't marry a panther, would you?" The underlying assumption is that the audience will understand the reference. Also, the very fact that after ten years Mowgli still has to return to "his own kind" indicates a casual acceptance of a separation of ethnicities.
Gender in The Jungle Book is a substantial theme. At three notable moments in the story, United States gender relations and expectations are superimposed on what is nominally a children's movie. First, Bagheera brings the infant Mowgli to the wolf family. He states, in the voice-over narration, that he knew that he would have no problem with the female wolf because of her maternal instinct. The panther, however, was worried about how the male, Rana, would react. When Rana returns to the den to find his mate already over the basket containing the human infant, the female gives him a coy smile with heavy-lidded eyes. The unspoken assumption here is that the female wolf would instant bond with any infant presented to her. The American woman was likely perceived in a similar manner; the concept that a woman's proper activity was raising children.
At a second point in the movie, Colonel Hathi the elephant refuses to help Bagheera find Mowgli. Colonel Hathi operates a predominantly male, pseudo-military herd of elephants. The only female elephant is Hathi's mate, Winifred, who breaks ranks and tells Hathi that if he doesn't help search for Mowgli that she would assume command of the herd. Hathi replies that it would be "outrageous" to have a female leading his herd. In reality, elephant herds are composed of mostly females, calves, and adolescent males. Elephants engage in a very matriarchal system of behaviors, as do many herd animals. For Winifred the elephant to be normally passive and subordinate to the males indicates a specific cultural bias of the United States. Furthermore, the fact that Winifred only intervenes in her mate's incompetence when the welfare of a child is at stake is another example of American cultural expectations of maternity. Women are expected to be passive members of society and to raise children.
Finally, a girl sings about having a daughter of her own to fetch the water. She sings about finding a handsome husband and having a daughter. She gives Mowgli "bedroom eyes," a heavy-lidded glance from under her eyelashes, twice during the course of the song. She is drawn as only slightly older than Mowgli, though it's conceivable that she is supposed to be the same age as Mowgli. That means that two ten-year-olds are fawning and making eyes at each other like teenagers. The sexuality implied is casual and assumed to be appropriate. Americans in 1967 either expected or perceived their children to be adolescents by the age of ten years old, and to begin engaging in more adult behavior.
The animals in Jungle Book are more or less egalitarian, with little that can be called "class." Even the wolf pack is governed more through group consensus than arbitrary power. Two notable exceptions are Shere Khan the tiger and Colonel Hathi the elephant. Shere Khan embodies naked force; he compels other characters to act because of his unspoken threat of violence, playing on an American cultural anxiety about despotism. Colonel Hathi, in contrast, is presented as far more garrulous, but governing his herd through the assumption of power. He thinks he is in charge, therefore the other elephants defer to him. This seems to be an illustration of American culture's true perception of leadership: since America is the most powerful and America acts like the leader of democratic republics, then American must actually be the most powerful leader of democratic republics. Furthermore, should the assumption that America is a leader ever be challenged, the implied threat of violence remains.
Colonel Hathi the character comes across as incompetent. Shere Khan is vicious. Both individuals are ascribed British accents, a linguistic characteristic from a culture that closely resembles North American culture, but is still markedly different. In this way, the fear of an outsider can be mitigated by associating "foreign" with "inferior," while the anxiety of tyranny is left intact.
Peculiar to The Jungle Book is a lack of economy depicted. Only three times are characters displayed engaging in self-sufficiency activities. Baloo is depicted using his claws to pick fruit, a girl is shown gathering water from a stream, and Shere Khan is animated as hunting. In no other case do characters engage in activities normally associated with survival in the jungle. Notably, Bagheera is never shown hunting, even though he a large cat predator. This absence of modes of survival could be a key to US culture in the late 1960s. The movie is entertainment and an escape from reality. The movie, in and of itself, is a specific reality and should have few overlapping elements with the reality of the filmgoer. Enough of the story must contain cultural flags for the viewer to empathize with the characters, but should not be a faithful reproduction of everyday life.
The lack of economy depicted in The Jungle Book can be associated with a cultural disconnect from the natural world. For example, four vultures claim that "nobody wants us, either." In reality, buzzards are an intimate part of natural life all around the world. Their niche is to consume dead animals; they are a specialist and are vital to reintroducing animal protein back into the organic cycle. But in the movie the vultures are separated from the rest of the animal community. Also, at the beginning of the movie, Bagheera narrates that "10 times the rains came," meaning the monsoon season. That means ten years passed from the time Bagheera found Mowgli to the time the final adventure begins, yet, when pressed by Mowgli, Bagheera states that the boy would never "survive a day in the jungle" and must return to the "man-village." This would seem to be a reflection of American society's conceit that humans do not belong as a part of nature, but are supposed to be separate from nature.
Based on inferences from The Jungle Book, United States culture in 1967 was patriarchal, largely egalitarian with classes loosely defined by race, gender, and the appearance of strength. Within The Jungle Book, the expectations of gender relations are expressed, with depictions of three very specific types of females; women are expected to be natural-born mothers, to remain passive except where their roles as mothers are prioritized, and to be sexually available to the husband. Children were expected to assume adult behaviors as early as possible. This is not an exceptionally unusual division of society in Western Europe. However, because survival methods are not depicted in great detail, conclusions regarding the true viability of US culture would be premature. Certain assumptions can be safely made regarding race, class, gender, and power relationships because they are actually portrayed by the characters of The Jungle Book.