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TARZAN
Rating: 
USA. 1999.
Directors – Chris Buck & Kevin Lima, Screenplay – Tab Murphy, Bob Tzudiker & Noni White, Based on the Novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Producer – Bonnie Arnold, Music – Mark Mancina, Songs – Phil Collins, Visual Effects Supervisor – Peter DeMund. Production Company – Disney.
Voices:
Tony Goldwyn (Tarzan), Minnie Driver (Jane Porter), Rosie O’Donnell (Terk), Glenn Close (Kala), Wayne Knight (Tantor), Brian Blessed (Clayton), Nigel Hawthorne (Professor Archimedes Porter), Lance Henriksen (Kerchak), Alex D. Linz (Young Tarzan)
Plot: A couple and their young child are abandoned on the African coast by a shipwreck and build a treehouse in the jungle. After a leopard kills the couple, the baby is adopted by Kala, an ape mother who has lost her own child. The child, named Tarzan, grows up among the apes, where he is constantly having to fight for acceptance. One day, an expedition led by Professor Porter and guided by the hunter Clayton comes into the jungle. Tarzan saves Porter’s daughter Jane from baboons and becomes captivated by her. However, as Jane teaches Tarzan to talk, Clayton schemes to fool Tarzan into helping him capture the gorillas.
Tarzan is one of a handful of characters – along with Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and the Frankenstein monster – that has enjoyed an extraordinary screen proliferation. What must be said about Tarzan is that despite the enduring quality of the character, few among the sixty odd Tarzan films are particularly good. The first two Johnny Weissmuller films – Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan and His Mate (1934) – were the best, the first a loopily cute jungle romance in pidgin English, the second an enthralling adventure film. The remaining ten Weissmuller films and the numerous imitators are insipid adventure films where weak, interchangeable adventure plots play alongside laughable jungle soap operatics as Tarzan and Jane play tree house where the elephants operate makeshift elevators and Cheetah does the laundry. With the origin tale out of the way, every Tarzan film and tv series is then stuck with telling jungle adventure stories and after a time there are only so many poacher, lost city and greedy adventurers looking for elephant graveyard stories that can be told before things blur into a sameness. Even Edgar Rice Burroughs discovered this problem after fifteen Tarzan novels. Tarzan from the 1980s onwards has become a good deal more environmentally conscious but that too has become a cliche. There are only a handful of Tarzan films worth watching – the aforementioned first two Johnny Weissmuller entries, some of the Sy Weintraub entries of the 1960s, which are some of the best out-and-out Tarzan adventure films, and of course the superlative Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), which filtered the Tarzan myth through the English arthouse, elevating the pulp originals with a seriousness that not even Edgar Rice Burroughs had originally conceived.
When I first heard three years earlier that Disney were going to do an animated Tarzan, I shuddered at the thought. What immediately came to mind was something akin to Disney’s animated version of Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1967) – the original stories of which were the model for Tarzan – where Mowgli was accompanied by singing animals. The idea of Tarzan accompanied by musical chimpanzees and the film pitched down to the level of Disney’s recent Aladdin (1992) and Hercules (1997) where any potential seriousness is buried under pop culture in-references and one-liners was not a particularly promising prospect.
The surprise then is how good Disney’s Tarzan is. In fact, Tarzan is one of the best entries among the 1990s renaissance of Disney animation. It achieves this largely by avoiding the silliness of Aladdin and Hercules and pitching the story to an adult level. Moreover, Tarzan manages to squeeze new things out a story that has been done to death by now. Being a Disney film, it is able to give far more time over to Tarzan’s childhood than any other Tarzan adaptation, simply because a young boy surrounded by talking apes is something that Disney animation can do far better than any live-action film. The film also throws in some neat asides explaining parts of the Tarzan myth – the origin of the eeh-ah-eeh-ah-eeh-ah yodel (it is the young Tarzan’s natural ability at imitating other animals) and the reasons for him emerging as such an outstanding athlete and fighter (him trying to keep up with and be accepted by the rest of the ape tribe). Although, for some reason, the name Clayton, instead of being Tarzan’s English family name, goes to the villain of the show.
Modern Disney animated films have determinedly pushed an envelope in terms of trying to discover what can be done with animation. The dance sequence in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and the opening of The Lion King (1994) pushed 3-D computer animation to new unheard of levels of achievement. Tarzan takes CGI animation to heights that make those seem like the efforts of fumbling beginners. The vine-swinging and branch-surfing scenes, where the animation camera leaps right in there with Tarzan, swinging, flipping, diving and ducking through the foliage like the camera has been placed on a high-speed rollercoaster, are utterly exhilarating. When it comes to the action sequences, Tarzan’s fight with the leopard proves a show-stopper. However, this is surpassed by Tarzan and Jane’s flight from the baboons, an action sequence that is so breathlessly exciting that one doubts any live-action film this year will manage to top it.
In all other regards, Tarzan is top-notch. Rosie O’Donnell as a brattish ape and Wayne Knight as a gauche elephant register so strongly and endearingly that one is rarely ever aware that Disney is wheeling out their standard formula sidekick characters. Phil Collins’ songs are the only miscalculation – the blandly MOR Collins seems a hard stretch to imagine as someone appropriate to musically accompanying primal jungle heroics – but these are kept to a thankful minimum. (There is one appealing musical number where the apes inadvertently form a tin pan orchestra as they trash the explorers’ camp). Minnie Driver makes a delightful Jane – her blend of prim Victorian forthrightness and coy delight makes for a combination so appealing that she surely tops all other live-action competitors hands-down for the sexiest performance of the year.
Disney subsequently spun Tarzan out as an animated tv series The Legend of Tarzan (2001) and then a video-released film sequel Tarzan & Jane (2002).
Co-director Kevin Lima subsequently moved over into live-action with 102 Dalmatians (2000) and Enchanted (2007). Chris Buck next went onto co-direct Surf’s Up (2007).
(No. 6 on the SF, Horror & Fantasy Box-Office Top 10 of 1999 list).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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