When I think of how much influence Walt Disney has had in my life, it’s strange to realize we never shared the planet. My earliest memories, like most people my age and younger, center around things Disney, yet Walt passed away several months before I was even born. We all grew up in pre-VCR America watching the old-school classics like “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Bambi,” every seven years in the theater. And there was a certain magic to those films that I believe came from the vision of Walt Disney himself, because it just wasn’t the same for a long time after he was gone. The last animated feature to have been produced under his watchful eye is “The Jungle Book,” which hit theaters Christmas 1967, not quite a year after the House of Mouse lost its master. Then came a pretty extended dry spell broken only by the undersea adventures of Ariel and her crew a generation later. The touch of Walt Disney is easy to see in the telling of Mowgli’s story--examining the definition of family, stressing the importance of loyalty and relationships over conforming to societal norms, well-meaning but often bumbling good triumphing over sleek yet heartless evil. It took more than twenty years after Walt Disney’s death for the studio to remember that those themes have a purity and clarity of purpose any generation can relate to. In the Random House version of The Jungle Book, all our favorite characters are present. As it should be.

http://catalog.ebay.com/Walt-Disneys-Jungle-Book-Rudyard-Kipling-1974-Hardcover-Illustrated-/2664903

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