The Jungle Book live action movie on Netflix

The recycled Disney story ‘The Jungle Book’ puts a real boy in a forest of pixels....

Disney’s new take on “The Jungle Book” is being touted as a live-action movie, though there’s scarcely anything alive in it. That goes for the gaudy and glorious flora, the gathering clouds and the wind stirring them, all of which were created, with various degrees of believability, via computers. The child playing Mowgli — the human orphan turned wolf child — is played by an actual kid, who frolics with computer-generated critters, a smart call, given that animals can be tricky to work with and that some of this menagerie’s real-life equivalents are (sorry to be a bummer) endangered.

Studios are in the recycling business, and while this “The Jungle Book” is lightly diverting, it is also disappointing, partly because it feels like a pumped-up version of Disney’s 1967 animated film, with more action and less sweetness. It also feels strangely removed from our moment. About the only thing that feels of today is that its lush and arid environments and padding paws were digitally created. The resulting look, pitched between photorealism and impressionism, hovers between the realistic and the uncanny. It turns out that the movie was shot in a Los Angeles warehouse, which paradoxically seems like an old-fashioned way to make worlds.

Disney’s first version opened in the United States a year after the country created its first list of endangered species. The studio may not have been thinking of “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s 1962 environmental shocker, but “The Jungle Book” hinges on a barefoot child who lives in a furry, fanged commune right out of a pastoral idyll. The film features tangy vocal performances, hand-drawn animation and the ear-worming ditty “The Bare Necessities.” But it also has queasy-making passages, none more so than the scene in which Louis Prima, as the orangutan King Louie, sings a Dixieland version of “I Wanna Be Like You” — “An ape like me/Can learn to be human, too” — which the songwriters Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman wrote with Louis Armstrong in mind.

Richard M. Sherman later said that Disney rejected casting a black man, fearing potential trouble with the N.A.A.C.P. For all the ostensible timelessness of its storytelling, Disney has always made movies that speak to its audiences and the world they live in. Even so, it’s hard not to squirm through the number with Prima’s scatting ape because of the troubling signifiers it throws out. At the same time, the film partly alleviates, however unwittingly, Rudyard Kipling’s weighty colonialist baggage, both by giving Mowgli, an Indian child, a golly-gee American voice, and by casting George Sanders as the villainous tiger, Shere Khan, who sounds just as you would expect a world-weary British royal to sound after centuries of pillaging. So, a mixed Disney bag, as usual, with a hippie kid, confusing politics and fuzzy-wuzzies.

Directed by Jon Favreau, the busy redo continues Hollywood’s infatuation with British actors, though this time it’s Idris Elba who puts the purr into Shere Khan. Much like the 1967 movie, this one has a loose relationship with the Kipling tales, originally published in 1894. It’s no surprise, given Kipling’s gravity, that the 2016 movie sticks close to the first film in its boyish bounce and sunny vibe. Written by Justin Marks, it opens with Mowgli (Neel Sethi) as a prepubescent, racing alongside his protector, the panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), who years earlier placed him in the care of a mother wolf, Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o). Much of the story involves Shere Khan’s plotting against Mowgli amid adventures with Baloo the bear (Bill Murray), Kaa the snake (Scarlett Johansson) and others.

Shere Khan is still the baddie, but now he’s lethally, instead of imperiously, cool, which seems unfair, given that Bengal tigers are endangered. The rest of the adult animals, meanwhile, largely register as noble, particularly the elephants that Bagheera and Mowgli bow down before. In the 1967 film, the elephants are amusingly buffoonish and march in a pachyderm parade as their leader invokes his time with the maharajah. The 2016 movie doesn’t refer directly to our environmental catastrophes, including the decimation of the elephant population. Yet when Bagheera now instructs Mowgli to bow before the elephants, it feels as if the filmmakers were gesturing to the truth that this fantasy and its relation to the real world are now tragically different from what they were in Kipling’s time.

And when Mowgli helps out the elephants, there’s a suggestion that humans can play their part in their rescue, which is a comforting moral for the children who are this movie’s main audience. At the same time, it would be heartening if Disney took a more environmentally aware stance in the sequel that’s already been discussed, especially given that the company’s brand owes as much to the natural world as to princesses. In recent years, the Disney princess has undergone a radical makeover, evolving into a can-do figure who exists in that cinematic sweet spot between her fantastical world and our real one. The studio’s animal kingdom could use a comparable makeover.

In the Kipling stories, every creature abides by the Law of the Jungle, a decree that’s been read as a proxy for British imperialist rule. Both the 1967 and 2016 Mowglis, by contrast, live under the Law of Disney, which dictates that humans can exist with nature, as long as nature isn’t too wild. There’s an argument to be made against that kind of cuddly domination of nature. Yet it’s also true that generations have grown up loving and respecting animals (as animals, not just human surrogates) because of the peaceable kingdom that Disney has created. Here’s hoping that next time Mowgli shows up onscreen, he trades in his four-legged foe for some two-legged villains — before the only wild worlds we have left are computer-generated.