His relationship with Mowgli is less strict teacher and more protective older brother, and his character's backstory is more fleshed out than his Disney counterpart.

Christian Bale voices Bagheera, who somehow manages to easily replace Ben Kingsley in the role of the wise black panther with so much more emotion.

Every voice lent to the film's animal cast is quite assuredly British, which is exactly what a film based on classic Hindu-British literature needed. The film is held up by an all-star cast for its animal characters who somehow bring out the exceptional sophistication of these creatures. You can also see the faces of the real actors behind the CGI, and that definitely gives them more personality. Mowgli focuses on putting the humanity in the animals - sometimes to uncanny degrees - by emphasizing their emotion in expressive facial structures, sidelining realism to allow its talking animals to take their proper roles as characters.

While the Disney film devotes itself to creating realistic animals, it can suffer from the issues that plagued Disney's 2019 live-action remake of The Lion King - animal characters failing to visually show human emotion. Part of that is in the characters themselves. Rather than just being a cute adventure story, it really feels like something based on classical British literature from over a century ago. Mowgli feels more in line with an old classic. There is an almost admirable quality of honor in this untamed world. The animals that live within are truly animals, capable of great ferocity, threat, rage, and hate, but still somehow love and compassion through the turmoil and ruthlessness of nature. The jungle is harsh and unforgiving, filled with raw struggle and conflict referencing the cruel law of the wild, which the Disney film only paid lip service to yet never embraced in its visceral glory. There is even one particular scene that probably left many kids traumatized.

RELATED: ‘Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle’ Review: A Blood-Soaked Version of ‘The Jungle Book’ There is grit, violence, death, and even brutality in a way that befits the original stories with serious, adult themes.

So much so that it's arguably not even fit for kids. The Jungle Book is a Disney film, after all, and Serkis' jungle epic is a much darker, scarier, and even disturbing take on the original Kipling anthology. There are, of course, plenty of similarities with the Disney movie and Mowgli, mostly due to the remake taking more elements from the source material than the original animation did, but Mowgli is not the happy-go-lucky adventure film the Disney competitor is.

The mowgli stories