Bagheera Ranjan and warns Baloo to be careful before he goes inside to help Mowgli. After Shere Khan is trapped, Mowgli introduces Bagheera to Shanti, the girl who is Mowgli's best friend at the village. Near the end of the film, Ranjan is shown playing with Bagheera's tail. At first Bagheera is scared, but he later enjoys playing with him while Mowgli, Shanti, and Baloo sing the reprise of "The Bare Necessities". In the 1994 live-action film, (portrayed by a black jaguar named Shadow) Bagheera serves as a jungle animal friend to Mowgli and his pet wolf, Grey Brother. After Mowgli
The Jungle Book do, through the character of Mowgli himself; through his "kindly mentors", Bagheera and Baloo; through the repeated failure of the "bully" Shere Khan; through the endless but useless talk of the Bandar-log; and through the law, which makes the jungle "an integrated whole" while enabling Mowgli's brothers to live as the "Free People". The academic Jan Montefiore commented on the book's balance of law and freedom that "You don't need to invoke Jacqueline Rose on the adult's dream of the child's innocence or Perry Nodelman's theory of children's literature colonising its readers' minds with a double fantasy of the child