GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE

“Watch out for that tree!” That’s the hilarious refrain in this rollicking film as George (Brendan Fraser) swings from tree to tree like a goofy version of Tarzan. Agile and swift on the dangling vines of the jungle, there’s just one vital skill which George has been unable to master — how to avoid a crash landing. But, like all cartoonesque heroes, George breaks neither leg nor tooth.

Disney’s George of the Jungle, which was a runaway hit in USA last year, is a take-off on all jungle films from Tarzan to The Lion King, with some great elements of originality thrown in.

The explanation of George’s presence in the jungle in dispensed with in the animated title sequence — long ago an airline crashed in the African jungles. All the passengers were rescued except for a missing baby boy, George. He grows up into a strong young man in the company of a talking ape who acts as guide-cum-polished butler, a pet elephant with dog-like characteristics, a group of bongo-playing apes, an intelligent toucan, and a host of other animals who communicate and scheme with George in the most unexpected fashion.

George’s first taste of the outside world and the female species comes in the form of Ursula (Leslie Mann), a rich American who he rescues from a lion attack while her pompous and bumbling fiance, Lyle (Thomas Hayden Church), has a fainting fit. The rest of the film unfolds as a flowering romance between George and Ursula, who are pursued by Lyle and his bigoted companions, the former after his fiancee and the latter after the talking ape. This undesirable trio is accompanied by a group of local Africans and the interaction between the two sides cleverly turns upside down all the stereotypes about the ’cultured superiority’ of whites in relation to the ’inferior’ and ’primitive’ blacks, resulting in some very funny exchanges.

The film’s strength, apart from Brendan Fraser’s winning performance, is its complete lack of pretentiousness. Possibility and probability unashamedly make way for the unrelenting plot which takes its unsuspecting characters from the jungles of Africa to the heart of San Francisco and back again to the jungle in a jaunt that refuses to take itself seriously. And it has a swinging theme song to boot.