Featuring the voices of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. Rated PG. Now playing.

It says something about the technical wonders of The Jungle Book that the talking-animal characters are more developed than the human one.

The wildly visual adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s classic stories of Mowgli, the man-cub raised by wolves, hits a new milestone: digital animation that looks so real you forget it’s digitally animated. A sleek, glowing-yellow-eyed panther appears out of the shadows, speaking in Ben Kingsley’s plummy voice. A swaying savanna suddenly reveals a camouflaged, charging tiger. And a water truce brings out a parade of babbling crested porcupines, wrinkly rhino families, and jump-happy kangaroo mice.

The result is a film that somehow mixes the old-school pleasures of watching Wild Kingdom with a fantasy jungle that has a more tactile, heightened reality than anything in Avatar. Despite the perils of giving a beloved Disney chestnut a 21st-century reboot, this really does bring a storybook to life—in a way that feels almost old-Hollywood-epic instead of super-computerized.

The action-packed effects are awe-inducing, but it’s the characters, which show Elf director Jon Favreau’s warm, eccentric touches, that make all of this work—and prove how far we’ve come since Dr. Doolittle.

What’s most amazing is how some of the big-name actors’ facial expressions seem to have been absorbed into the minute movements of the animals they play. Driven out of his wolf pack by a vengeful, fire-scarred tiger (voiced by a memorably menacing Idris Elba), Mowgli (Neel Sethi) takes up with burly bear Baloo, who Bill Murray turns into a kind of lovable, grinning slacker. Scarlett Johansson is a python so sibilantly seductive that even we’re surprised when she puts the squeeze on someone. And let’s not even give away the joys of watching a mammoth, Marlon Brando–like ape King Louie lord it over an Apocalypse Now temple full of monkey minions. (We’ll leave the voice a surprise.)

Amid all this, it’s perhaps no shock that newcomer Sethi comes off as a little two-dimensional. On the other hand, his very every-boy-ness may allow all of us to experience this majestic, immersive adventure with such childlike wonder.