TARZAN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Disney Studios has made three films
about the Tarzan-like Mowgli. Now they finally have
made a film about Tarzan himself, but what a
disappointment. They have aimed it at a very young
audience and thrown in a lot of anachronistic
humor. They have turned their backs on all but the
basics of the original plot. The Phil Collins songs
are nauseating and the so-called comic style is
just as bad. The animation is great, but little
else will be of interest to Burroughs fans or
adults. This is a real letdown for Disney
animation after MULAN. Rating: 4 (0 to 10), low 0
(-4 to +4)
Disney Studios seems to love the concept of feral children. They have made three films from Rudyard Kipling's THE JUNGLE BOOK. Now they are starting in on Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs's even more popular character originally inspired by the Mowgli tales. And with luck, starting is all they will do. Tarzan would be a good choice for Disney studios since Disney never feels particularly obligated to be faithful to the source material. After all, why bother? Their version will be the canonical one after it is released anyway, right? But Burroughs fans are used to disappointment. With all the many theatrical film versions of Tarzan almost none have been accurate to the Burroughs conception. Until the Disney version the original 1918 film version of TARZAN OF THE APES and the first half of GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES are the only films that even look at where Tarzan came from and how he got to be Tarzan. The rest just assumed there was this man in the jungle.
In the new Disney animated version we begin with a mother, father, and baby escaping from a burning ship and trying to survive ashore in equatorial Africa. (In the book they were Alice and John Clayton, but the name Clayton is used in this film for the villain.) At about the same time the she-gorilla Kala (voiced by Glenn Close) lost her own baby to Sabor the fierce leopard who holds Kala's tribe in fear. The grieving Kala hears the cry of a human baby and finds a tree house destroyed by Sabor, and in it a dead man and woman, and their still- living baby. Over the objection of her mate Kerchak (Lance Henrickson) and the disapproval of the other apes Kala adopts the baby, naming him Tarzan. Tarzan (Alex D. Linz as a boy and Tony Goldwyn as a man) grows up an outsider with an androgynous friend Terk (Rosie O'Donnell who brings entirely too much Rosie O'Donnell humor to the film). Tarzan struggles to win the approval of Kerchak, but Kerchak is a bigot who is not ready to accept a human into his family. (Yes, there are many politically-correct lessons in the course of the film.) Eventually Tarzan meets humans who come in an expedition to find gorillas. The expedition is made up of Professor Porter (Nigel Hawthorne), his daughter Jane (Minnie Driver), and guide Clayton (Brian Blessed). Of course, the expected love story is told one more time.
I cannot think what Disney's studios could have done to so alienate Hans Zimmer that he would leave them in the lurch when they so desperately needed him. Zimmer, who scored films like THE LION KING, has a feel for the sound of African music. He could have done a beautiful score for TARZAN. Instead we have a collection of totally obnoxious songs by Phil Collins. Mark Mancina's music harmlessly fills in the spaces. On the other hand, the animation is little short of wonderful with odd stylistic touches that mix flat animation with some impressive three-dimensional animation. In Disney's new tradition, a different team animates each of the major characters. One advantage of this, I suppose is a lot more people can be working in parallel on a single scene, yet a single character is consistently animated through the entire film. Some parts of the screen may look like traditional flat animation; others will seem to be almost filmed as live-action. It could be bothersome having more than one animation techniques in a single scene, but it really is not. The one animation problem is that the words do not really fit the characters' lips well.
Several problems with the script and its visualization show how this film talks down to its audience. We see Tarzan skid over tree- limbs with obvious skate-boarding motions. And the tree limbs would have to be thirty feet long or more for the time he spends on each limb. And where in the world are there so many major waterfalls in such close proximity? We know immediately that Clayton is a villain because he is so ugly. Just once it would be nice to have an attractive villain and an ugly hero. (Lookism apparently continues to be exempt from the Disney agenda.) How likely is it that the expedition has brought a magic lantern and a praxinoscope and hence is prepared to teach Tarzan about civilization. This seems like in the worst traditions of "Gilligan's Island."
There are no African people in this version. That is not surprising since however they are portrayed there would be someone unhappy with the representation. Though Africans are present in the original novel, Disney decision-makers probably thought it was best side-stepping the issues of including them in their adaptation. There have been some people taking issue with the fact they have been eliminated, but it is relatively few. It is ironic that the filmmakers may be afraid to put in native Africans since they have Tarzan himself ask the question, "why are you afraid of anything different from you?" Apparently the filmmakers felt they themselves had something to fear. But it is doubly ironic because Tarzan himself is a symbol of the power of diversity. After all he is presumably the lord of the animals because he is actually human, and he is an invincible hero among humans because he was raised by animals.
Disney studios had the potential to make a very good adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic fantasy TARZAN OF THE APES. Instead they have set their sights considerably lower and made a film that will have little appeal beyond grade-school level audiences. I rate it a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1999 Mark R. Leeper
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