Voice-over for Mowgli ‘was challenging’

ACTOR Abhishek Bachchan said voice-over for the Indianised version of English movie Mowgli: The Legend of the Jungle has been challenging and liberating.

Netflix India launched the Indian version trailer of the movie in the presence of film-maker, director and actor , Andy Serkis. Others at the launch were the original voice-over cast, Christian Bale, Freida Pinto and Rohan Chand, and Indian dubbing team, which includes Bachchan, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor.

Talking about voicing black panther (Bagheera), Bachchan said the whole experience was very challenging as well as liberating.

The Manmarziyaan actor said: “It was very challenging. For the first time in our films or industry, there isn’t a huge element of your personality that you always bring through characters, which is probably not prevalent in the West. In Indian cinema, it is almost the prerequisite... What was liberating is that you got to be a new character entirely and you have to work within those boundaries.”

Transition of language was equally challenging, said the Dostana actor, adding: “What was nice was that I wasn’t playing a human being, and keeping that in mind, keeping the way Andy Serkis has designed the characters, the way Christian Bale has performed it, and then try to Indianise it... that was very challenging.

“And also to fit linguistically, Hindi into English dialogue, was quite tough. Both are completely different languages, with different tone and meter, so that was also challenging.”

The Netflix version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is darker and edgier than releases of its previous versions.