‘Die reine Notwendigkeit / The Pure Necessity - David Claerbout’

What if animals stopped behaving like humans? And music was banned from the soundtrack? A non-narrative revisiting of the Disney classic, this emulation of The Jungle Book abandons all singing, dancing and silly humour to render the animals back their natural dignity. Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa, whose songs and slapstick acts have been delighting children and adults alike for decades, are now back to being pure bear, panther and python.

For The Pure Necessity, internationally acclaimed Belgian artist David Claerbout and a team of professional artists painstakingly redrew the frames of Wolfgang Reitherman’s prototype of The Jungle Book by hand, one by one, and then assembled them to create an entirely new film, a film that has dispensed all ‘humanization’ of the animals – but also erased its young protagonist Mowgli.