Disney and the director Jon Favreau have done a spectacular job of realising their new version of The Jungle Book using the sort of sophisticated digital effects familiar from Life of Pi. The only human visible on screen in Favreau’s movie is the man-cub Mowgli, played by the 10-year-old newcomer Neel Sethi. He fraternises convincingly with computer-generated animals including Bagheera the Panther (Ben Kingsley) and the fearsome tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba).

What no one involved in the project seems to have noticed is the irony of putting all this expensive, cutting-edge technology in the service of a story which sentimentalises the primitivism lurking within civilisation. It’s rather like cooking an enormous fry-up to mark the start of Healthy Eating Week, or throwing a decadent bash to promote austerity.

The notion of a child growing up among beasts did not begin with Mowgli. In fact, it is deeply rooted in ancient culture and mythology: Romulus and Remus were said to have been raised by wolves, while Zeus was suckled by a goat, which was really his foster-mother Amalthea in animal form. Still, it’s Mowgli who has become the most enduring incarnation of this idea.

It was, of course, Rudyard Kipling who created him. Mowgli appeared in eight of the 15 stories spread across two volumes of The Jungle Book between 1893 and 1895. In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan, where similar ideas were worked out in maturity. Mowgli is a boy brought up among wolves, Tarzan a man happiest in the company of apes, but each serves as a repository for our most stubborn fantasies about who we might be underneath our civilised façade.

That new versions of both stories are released this year – The Legend of Tarzan opens in the summer, with Alexander Sarsgård of True Blood representing surely the best chance yet for the loincloth to catch on in polite society – indicates that the tensions explored in them are far from resolved. And in 2018, there will be yet another Jungle Book, this time with motion-capture performances from Benedict Cumberbatch as Shere Khan and Christian Bale as Bagheera.

It goes without saying that Kipling is a problematic, imperialist writer. “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilised person,” wrote George Orwell in 1942. But Mowgli himself has managed to emerge unscathed from any controversy about the imperialist overtones of The Jungle Book, thanks in no small part to the 1967 Disney adaptation.

It is as the impish, inquisitive hero of the earlier film, with a mop of unruly black hair, that most audiences know Mowgli. His chirpy tones were provided by the son of the film’s director, Wolfgang Reitherman. Bruce Reitherman was 12 when he was drafted in at the 11th hour after the original Mowgli’s voice broke during the four-year production.

Disney’s first Mowgli is an enchanting creature who diverges from the Kipling version in all but his initial innocence. When he appears in Mowgli’s Brothers (the opening story of The Jungle Book, though it was written after In the Rukh, which portrays Mowgli as an adult), he is “a naked brown baby … as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf’s cave at night”. But even in that first story, the innate superiority of man is stated with a harshness that will startle anyone whose only image of Mowgli comes courtesy of Disney.

This vengeful, strutting Mowgli, who puts down an insurrection among his critics (“[He] thrust his dead branch into the fire … and whirled it above his head among the cowering wolves”), has been successfully expunged from all screen versions of the character. So it’s chastening to return to the text and find that he is both cognisant of his own power and unafraid to exercise it: “He took his place at the Council Rock … when the Pack met, and there he discovered that if he stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so he used to stare for fun.” Even Bagheera, one of his closest friends, cannot hold his gaze for long. “Mowgli looked at him steadily between the eyes. The big panther turned his head away in half a minute.”

There is none of this in the first film incarnation of Mowgli, in the 1942 screen version of The Jungle Book. He is played here by the enchanting Indian actor Sabu, whose own background blurred for western audiences with the exoticism of the role. Sabu (who was only ever billed by that name, but whose full name was either Sabu Dastagir or Selar Shaik Sabu) was discovered by Robert Flaherty, who was casting in the late 1920s for a child to play the lead in a film of another of the Jungle Book stories, Toomai of the Elephants.

Sabu was an elephant driver, or mahout, for the Maharajah of Mysore; he had been taken in as a stable boy at the age of six. He was 11 when Flaherty clapped eyes on him riding an elephant. His buoyant charm transferred wonderfully to the screen in Elephant Boy, which opens with him talking breezily straight to camera for two minutes. When that picture’s producer, Alexander Korda, came to make The Jungle Book, Sabu, now 18, was an obvious fit for Mowgli.

The effects in the 1942 version are rudimentary; at one point, Mowgli grapples with a tiger that would be more at home in Toys R Us. But the image of a boy torn between the jungle and the man village, where he attracts the attention of the village elder’s daughter, was true to the story’s internal tensions between savagery and civilisation.

These opposing forces are not always where one would expect to find them. It is the supposedly primitive Mowgli, for instance, who points out the callousness of hunting for sport (he is aghast to discover a rug made from the skin of a bear with whom he once went fishing) and mocks the trophy of a tiger’s head mounted on the wall. “That tiger was old,” he laughs, undermining the hunter’s triumph. “He must have died in his sleep.”

There were no Jungle Book films made between Disney’s gem and a new version by the studio in 1994 (grandly titled Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book), which wasn’t animated in either sense of the word. But a similar narrative surfaced in other forms. Francois Truffaut’s 1969 film The Wild Child was based on the real-life case of Victor of Aveyron, who was discovered living in the woods in late 18th century France and inducted into society by the physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard. In 1975, Werner Herzog made The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, based on another factual case, this time concerning an adult foundling who materialised in a village in early 19th-century Germany.

In both instances, the casting process contributed to the on-screen authenticity. Truffaut hired Jean-Pierre Cargol, a young non-professional boy from the Romany community, as Victor, while Herzog chose Bruno S, who spent most of his adolescence in mental institutions, to play Kaspar. Though the effect could have been tasteless, the compassionate, sensitive direction of Truffaut (who cast himself as Itard, taking Cargol under his wing on-screen as well as off) and Herzog (who already had a track record in sympathetic portrayals of outsiders) made the actors seem understood rather than exploited.

Their performances, if that’s the right word for what may simply have been reality modulated for the camera, were certainly more compelling than the one given by Jodie Foster in the 1994 film Nell, about a grown woman discovered living wild and communicating in her own language. The distributor provided a glossary of “Nellish” words but critics were sceptical about the suggestion that this innocent (dubbed “Bride of Gump” by one wag) could impart wisdom to the rest of humanity. Referring to the film’s mix of the rough-hewn and the homespun, the late Philip French dubbed the movie The Little Hauser on the Prairie.

Each interpretation of the wild child story inevitably reveals something about the era in which it was made. The 1994 version of The Jungle Book, with Jason Scott Lee as Mowgli, seeks to right the wrongs of the original stories by casting imperialist Brits as the baddies. “What have we here? A savage!” proclaims the upper-class bullyboy who is perturbed to find Mowgli in civilised society, before prescribing for the man-cub “a lesson in manners”. All very comforting for our more enlightened times, but it rather takes the biscuit that the film uses Kipling’s name in its title while disavowing the more inconvenient parts of his philosophy.

The new Jungle Book alludes gently to Kipling’s central point that Mowgli, and man in general, is seen as an inevitable threat to jungle life. After all, there was only one reason why the animals in Kipling’s story preferred not to put humans on the menu: “Man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers.”

Mowgli may represent lost innocence and purity to us, but to the animals in the story he is an obscure symbol of the evil men do. Perhaps there can never be an honest Jungle Book until Mowgli himself is brought fully to book in the jungle.