Disney's film takes its characters and setting from Kipling's 1894 collection: Mowgli raised by wolves, Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa, and Shere Khan as the tiger who wants him dead. The tone is the film's own and the distance is large. Kipling's stories are about law, hierarchy and belonging, and are written in a register closer to fable than to comedy; the film keeps the cast and the jungle and plays them as a musical. It is the version most audiences now mean by the title, which is itself part of the influence.