While watching Disney’s new live-action The Jungle Book, you’ll find you have to constantly remind yourself that what you’re seeing isn’t real, that it is the result of the efforts of a team of digital wizards, and wholly shot indoors in a studio. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to become lost in this gorgeous make-believe world of greens and golds, populated by all manner of creatures, all thoroughly lifelike—the talking thing aside, of course. This wondrously immersive quality of the film’s visuals, in itself, is a feat and a half in these times of heavy CGI-fatigue, but director Jon Favreau isn’t content to rely solely on snazzy effects—this is the rare retelling of a classic that doesn’t feel like a lazy, cash-grabby bid to hitch a ride on the shoulders of an already-successful concept.

Instead, Favreau and screenwriter Justin Marks manage a delicate balancing act: while, on one hand, they retain the broader arc and certain beloved elements of Disney’s own animated 1967 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s original tales, they also update the story in subtle ways, shedding some unwieldy bits and focusing determinedly and wisely on the dynamics between characters. Another smart move is the tone that they’ve opted for—instead of the sort of darker, grittier remakes of fairytales making the rounds these days in what is usually an obvious bid to appeal to multiple demographics, there is a welcome lightness about the proceedings here. The Jungle Book is, through and through, a children’s film, and one of the loveliest, most enjoyable contenders in that category of late.

Little Mowgli (Neel Sethi) has been raised by wolves. It was actually the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) who had found him as a baby, left out by his parents in some corner of the forest, and who had subsequently handed him over to the pack for caretaking. But Mowgli is discovering that suppressing his human-ness is a constant challenge: not only does he grow exceptionally slowly compared to his wolf-siblings and isn’t able to always match them physically, but he’s also prone to using “tricks”—such as fashioning new devices and tools—which both his wolf guardians, Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) and Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o), as well as Bagheera, have expressly forbade him from doing. Still, despite the frequent admonishments for deviating from pack rules, Mowgli is loved and happy.

Until the day he is sighted by Shere Khan (Idris Elba), a fearsome, ill-tempered tiger who declares that a man-cub has no place in the jungle—destined as he is to grow up and become as destructive as his other compatriots have been to the animals (Shere Khan has scars to prove it)—and vows to kill the boy himself. Bagheera decides Mowgli must be returned to the village if he is to stay alive. But the path back to civilisation isn’t as straight or easy as they might’ve thought—there is both danger and discovery, new friends and foes, to be encountered along the way, all while Mowgli struggles to determine just where it is he truly belongs.

I can’t emphasise enough on just how stunning The Jungle Book is to look at—the backgrounds, for instance, are simply dripping in detail, and there are some wide panoramic shots of various jungle locales, such as the waterfall and the monkey temple, that just plain take your breath away. And then we have the animals; much like in Life of Pi a few years ago, the non-human entities in this film have been crafted with such photorealistic precision—each slither of muscle and strand of hair carefully, painstakingly thought-through—that you can’t imagine technology could get any better than this (though it most likely will). Even having the characters talk, which could’ve easily lent a comical air to the film, is done convincingly; you know someone’s doing something right when audiences are not in the least jarred by hearing a panther speak in a British accent.

These visual flourishes, however, rather than being a gratuitous show of modern capabilities, serve instead to propel the narrative forward, the way they should do. Although there is a regular flurry of action on screen, Favreau keeps all eyes and attention firmly on our scrawny little hero for the most part, preventing him from drowning in overly-busy set-pieces, something we’ve seen happen many times before. The Jungle Book also boasts considerable—and rather unexpected—emotional weight; this owes largely to how the script has made attempts to flesh out the characters and the relationships between them to an appreciable degree, enough at least to have us invested in the stakes. This goes for the antagonist as well: Shere Khan is hardly your generic baddie—with a backstory that involves cruel treatment at the hands of man, there’s definitely more complexity to him than would be assumed.

Speaking of cruelty, while the film treads fairly lightly over most of its chosen themes—comprising familiar stuff of the be-yourself and be-brave variety—there is a distinct emphasis on the idea of mankind as a brutal, pitiless force. “They’ll ruin him…They’ll make a man out of him,” a character says at one point, referring to Mowgli’s impending return to the village. Indeed, even with an evil, vengeful tiger on the loose, among various other inherent dangers, the film indicates that the jungle is a much less terrible place than the world of men—ruled by arrogance and senseless aggression—with the result that we find ourselves hoping that Mowgli could somehow stay where he is. Much of The Jungle Book’s success, of course, is thanks to superb voice actors, who bring these characters to life: Kingsley, Nyong’o and Elba are all uniformly convincing, as is Bill Murray in a part that seems tailor-made for him. Sethi is a little stiff and frequently yells out his lines, but considering he is the only “real” character in the film and no doubt had to play against a green screen, with co-stars who were either non-existent or decked out in silly motion-capture gear, the young actor deserves major props for having taken on the challenges—particularly the high-octane physical elements of the performance—like a true champ.

As a children’s film that doesn’t aspire to pander to too many other age groups, The Jungle Book is a real triumph. With last year’s surprisingly effective live-action remake of Cinderella and now this, the course Disney is currently on, involving their imagining of age-old hits in charming, largely irony-free and visually-charged modern-day adaptations, is proving pretty darn fruitful. If I were you, I wouldn’t wait for this one to come out on DVD—it’s the stuff big screens were made for.