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Traditional animation, also known as hand-drawn animation, is an animation technique in which each frame of a film is drawn by hand. Traditional animation was the dominant form of animated feature filmmaking from the late 1930s until the beginning of the twenty-first century. The new millennium saw the rise of CG animation, which raked in unprecedented profits for studios, ultimately forcing traditional animation into obscurity.

The Lion King and The Simpsons Movie are the only two traditionally animated films that rank among the top 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time. With that being said, many traditionally animated films have still managed to amass significant profits from the worldwide box office. The highest-grossing traditional animated movies cover multiple eras in animation, from its early beginnings in the 1930s to the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s and into the modern era of the twenty-first century. Each of the highest-grossing traditional animated films...

If one were to search for "Disney Recycled Animation" on YouTube, one would find several videos showing side-by-side comparisons of 2D animated Disney films recycling the same bits of animation. It's not much of a "gotcha" if you know anything about the painstaking reality of what it takes to complete a traditionally animated feature film, nor is recycling shots something limited to films or television. If anything, animators repeating themselves is as inevitable as writers using their favorite turn of phrase over and over. (That's my cue to wipe away my own flop sweat.)

In the case of Disney's animated "The Jungle Book" and "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh", the two pictures have more in common than suspiciously identical scenes of young boys wandering around in the wild. "The Jungle Book" protagonist Mowgli the Man-Cub was voiced by Bruce Reitherman, who was then fresh off lending his vocals...

It’s not every day your audience includes the most famous anthropomorphic rodent in the world, but in celebration of Disney legend Mickey Mouse’s 90th birthday, members of Zac Brown Band performed as Mickey looked on from the best seat in the house. Brown and company performed “Bare Necessities,” a song from 1967’s The Jungle Book, a Disney film that didn’t feature the cartoon mouse, but instead included a wild kingdom of characters including the young man-cub Mowgli and his companion, Baloo the bear, who first performed the song onscreen.

Academy Award-winning actor Ben Kingsley has been cast as the voice of Bagheera in Disney’s upcoming The Jungle Book.

Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Justin Marks, The Jungle Book combines live action and animated filmmaking.

The film arrives in theaters in 3D on October 9, 2015.

From Wikipedia:

Inspired by the Rudyard Kipling’s book of the same name, it is the 19th animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series. Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, it was the last to be produced by Walt Disney, who died during its production. The plot follows Mowgli, a feral child raised in the Indian jungle by wolves, as his friends Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear try to convince him into leaving the jungle before the evil tiger Shere Khan arrives.

The early versions of both the screenplay and the soundtrack followed Kipling’s work more closely, with a dramatic,...

I did not grow up watching Disney animated movies like most kids (ironically, I am now conversant in them almost to the level of a true Disnoid). Indeed, I only remember having seen three in my young years: Lady and the Tramp, The Black Calderon and The Jungle Book. My memories of The Jungle Book being particularly thin, it was with great and somewhat nostalgic anticipation that I approached Disney’s new Blu-ray release of the film. Hit the jump for my review. Based on Rudyard Kipling’s short stories (originally published in magazines and later collected into a book of the same name), The Jungle Book follows Mowgli (Bruce Reitherman) Aka the Man Cub, a young boy who was lost in the Indian jungle as a babe and subsequently raised by woods. When the human-hating tiger Shere Khan (George Sanders) appears, the animals determine that Mowgli should return to...

The Jungle Book (1967) was Disney’s 19th animated feature and the last that Walt himself had a hand in, though it wasn’t released in theaters until nearly a year after his death.Sebastian Cabot, Phil Harris, George Sanders, J. Pat O’Malley, Sterling Holloway, and especially Louis Prima made animated characters come to brilliant life in The Jungle Book, well-adapted from Kipling’s collection of short stories. The story followed the man-cub Mowgli (voiced by Bruce Reitherman in an appealing performance) as he trekked from the jungle to the man-village. Along the way he encountered a strange parade of figures including the sniveling Kaa (Holloway), the evil Shere Khan (Sanders) and the rambunctious King Louie (Prima, who got the film’s best song – ‘Bear Necessities’). His two parental figures were Baloo the Bear and the sage Bagaheera. They were voiced by Harris and Cabot and their chemistry together really made the triangle of Mowgli,...

Director Jon Favreau is in negotiations with Disney to make a live-action reboot of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. We first reported on the project in July, when Disney moved forward with a screenplay by Justin Marks (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo).

Here's what Jon Favreau had to say in a brief statement.

I can't say that much, but there is an interesting take that could be very cool, and the hope is to relaunch a family brand with certain mythic elements. It is my first real family film since Elf, and there are action elements and visual effects that I feel like my experience on the Iron Man films are going to be useful."

The original Rudyard Kipling novel was published in 1894, which followed a young orphaned boy who is raised in the jungle by a bear, a black panther, and a pack of wolves. The novel is now in the public domain.

The voice of Mowgli and the storyman behind the beloved 1967 animation recall the difficulties of pleasing Walt Disney

Bruce Reitherman, Mowgli

I was 11 and my dad, Wolfgang Reitherman, was the director so it didn't take much for him to see me on the sofa at home and have his lightbulb casting moment. I was the voice of Christopher Robin when I was six but had no other acting experience. I just sounded like an ordinary kid.

The makers wanted someone who sounded very innocent to play Mowgli, to soften the parts where, thanks to his lines, he might come across as a petulant teenager. But in the 1960s, it took four years to make an animated film – so if you cast a kid and didn't get to the cutting room quick enough, you'd end up with an adolescent. And sure enough, the first Mowgli had had to be replaced after his voice broke.

The voice of Mowgli and the storyman behind the beloved 1967 animation recall the difficulties of pleasing Walt Disney

Bruce Reitherman, Mowgli

I was 11 and my dad, Wolfgang Reitherman, was the director so it didn't take much for him to see me on the sofa at home and have his lightbulb casting moment. I was the voice of Christopher Robin when I was six but had no other acting experience. I just sounded like an ordinary kid.

The makers wanted someone who sounded very innocent to play Mowgli, to soften the parts where, thanks to his lines, he might come across as a petulant teenager. But in the 1960s, it took four years to make an animated film – so if you cast a kid and didn't get to the cutting room quick enough, you'd end up with an adolescent. And sure enough, the first Mowgli had had to be replaced after his voice broke.

Words like “legend” and “icon” get tossed around a lot in Hollywood, but the people who built the Walt Disney company, creating timeless films and beloved theme park attractions, earned those titles long ago. The studio holds its own “Legends” ceremony every year, but so does a group of dedicated enthusiasts known as the Disneyana Fan Club, and last weekend they honored three worthy recipients at their annual convention in Anaheim, California: Howard Green, Bruce Reitherman, and Tony Baxter. If their names aren’t of the household variety, the work they’ve done certainly is. I must disclose that Howard and Tony are good friends of mine, so I won’t pretend to be objective in writing...

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