Four years after their last animated feature film, The Sword in the Stone (1963) (in the interim they’d released the animated featurette Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966) and Mary Poppins (1964), with its animated sequences), Disney returned the form in real style with their adaptation of the Jungle Book stories by Rudyard Kipling. Starting with In the Rukh, first collected in Many Inventions in 1893, and encompassing two volumes of short stories, The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), they followed the adventures of Mowgli, a young, feral Indian boy raised by wolves in the jungle. There’s precious little of Kipling left in Disney’s exuberant adaptation but with a story as vividly told as this and with songs as infectiously catchy, that scarcely seems to matter. It would be the last animated feature that Walt Disney himself would be involved in – he died on 15 December 1966 while the film was still in production.

Like the book on which it’s based, The Jungle Book‘s plot is episodic in nature. Mowgli is found as a baby, abandoned in the jungles of India, by the black panther Bagheera (voiced by Sebastian Cabot). He leaves the baby with the wolf mother Raksha who raises him with the rest of her pack. Ten years later, with news that the dreaded tiger Shere Khan has returned to the area, the wolf council agree that it’s time Mowgli (voiced by Bruce Reitherman, son of the film’s director Wolfgang and brother of Richard and Robert who had voiced Wart in The Sword in the Stone) to be returned to the nearby man village for his own safety and is entrusted to Bagheera to accompany him. Mowgli is reluctant to leave the jungle he loves and on their journey he’s menaced by the mesmeric, sibilant and comically inept snake Kaa (Sterling Holloway) and befriended by the hip-talking Baloo the bear (Phil Harris who ad libbed most of his dialogue), a “shiftless, stupid jungle bum” according to Bagheera. There are encounters with a troupe of military elephants led by the officious Colonel Hathi (J. Pat O’Malley), a quartet of vultures who resemble a British Invasion pop group (one sports a Beatlesesque mop top and Liverpudlian accent), the orangutan King Louie (Louis Prima) who wants Mowgli to teach him the secret of fire and finally Khan (wonderfully voiced by George Sanders) himself before Mowgli is finally returned to the village where he falls in love with a young girl (Darleen Carr) and bids farewell to his animal friends.

Originally, as outlined by story artist Bill Peet, who had worked on One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book was going to be a much darker film, one closer to the tone of the original stories but with songs by Terry Gilkyson. The tone was changed in pre-production in favour of the more free-wheeling and breezy feel of the film we know and love. And the result is an absolute gem, Disney’s best animated feature for a long time, one full of gorgeous animation, slapstick comedy and unforgettable characters (Harris steals every single scene that Baloo appears in).

And then there are the songs, every one a little gem. Only one of Gilkyson’s tunes survived the change in direction, the marvellous The Bare Necessities, with the film’s other seven tunes composed by Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman, returning to Disney after their stint on Mary Poppins. The pick of their contributions here is the foot-stomping I Wan’na Be Like You, a wild jazz number sung by Prima, the choreography of the scene – which involves a pack of baboons and Baloo in drag – inspired by a performance that Prima and his band put on during their audition. It’s a superb song, though the sequence has been accused of a stereotypical representation of African Americans, such that Disney+ runs the film with a disclaimer and blocks the film from children’s profiles.

Equally worrying, but for very different reasons, is the very odd scene at the very end of the film when Mowgli reaches the “man village” and first meets “the girl”, the beautiful villager of indeterminate age whose singing has a very odd effect on the young boy. Indeed he seems almost sexually attracted the girl, as though Reitherman and his crew had, by this time, forgotten that Mowgli is only supposed to be ten years old. The film’s only other serious flaw is that for all the talk of how scary Shere Khan is, we barely get to see him. He appears late in the film, makes a few menaces to various characters and is then seen of following a very anti-climactic encounter with Mowgli. Given that his presence is the key motivator in getting Mowgli to leave the jungle, his threat feels somewhat over-stated. But these are minor drawbacks and the all-important younger audiences won’t care too much. The songs will have them dancing in the aisles, the animation will keep them enthralled and it would be impossible not to warm to the characters, particularly the fun-loving Baloo (“I’m gone man, solid gone!”)

Fans of Rudyard Kipling will baulk at the liberties taken with his stories and characters by scriptwriters Larry Clemmons, Ralph Wright, Ken Anderson and Vance Gerry, but that all-important young target audience wouldn’t give two hoots. It maybe peaks a little early with the I Wan’na Be Like You routine (the subsequent songs are all great but not a patch on that classic), but overall this is one of Disney’s most enjoyable, most upbeat and most beloved animated features. It was a huge box office hit, earning some $11.5 million on its first release. This may have been, in part, due to the fact that the public had been starved of Disney feature-length animation for so long but was also surely bolstered by return trips to the cinema. Subsequent re-releases in 1978, 1984 and 1990 only bolstered its significant income and cemented its position as one of Disney’s most popular films of all time.

Disney released a sequel, More Jungle Book, in the form of a 7-inch record in 1968 with Prima and Harris both returning to their roles and a direct-to-video sequel, The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story was released in 1998. Another sequel, The Jungle Book 2, was released theatrically in the States in 2003 and although a Jungle Book 3 was suggested two years later but never made, The Jungle Book joined so many Disney animated favourites in getting a live-action remake in 2016. So beloved were the songs from the original film that several of them (The Bare Necessities, Trust in Me, I Wan’na Be Like You) were reprised in versions using by stars Christopher Walken, Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray.