The King of the Apes was born to be a cartoon. If there had been such a thing as computer-generated animation back when Edgar Rice Burroughs conceived Tarzan, he might very well have scrapped the idea of writing 25 novels about the vine-swinging hero. I can just picture him going to knock on the door of Walt Disney (a teenager at the time) and saying, "Hiya, Walt. How’d you like to scrap that ‘Snow White’ idea and make a real eye-popper about this boy raised by apes who grows up to be this powerful dude with dreadlocks and big feet who zips through the jungle like he was shredding on a snowboard while yodeling like a Swiss goat-herder?"
To which Walt would undoubtedly have replied, "What’s a snowboard?"
While it’s sadly true that Burroughs and Disney probably never met, it’s happily true that their ancestors have teamed up (at least in spirit) to make, yes, an eye-popping, snowboard-shredding movie that turns out to be one of the Mouse Factory’s best entertainments since its touchy-feely revival that started with The Little Mermaid.
While we’ll always have wooden actors like Johnny Weissmuller and Lex Barker around for nostalgia’s sake, fans of the Great White Ape should be advised that Disney’s animated hero has set a benchmark for all others to beat. This is the Tarzan we’ve all been waiting for—he moves through the jungle like butter, free of the confines of flesh and blood. In short, the cartoon has an athleticism that even the best stuntman could only dream about.
Despite the Disnefied liberties taken with the original story, I think Burroughs himself would have been proud of this movie (at last, the poor guy can lift his head from the shame of the Bo Derek version). Here’s how he describes Tarzan in an early chapter of the first novel of the series:
He could spring twenty feet across space at the dizzy heights of the forest top and grasp with unerring precision, and without apparent jar, a limb waving wildly in the path of an approaching tornado. He could drop twenty feet at a stretch from limb to limb in rapid descent to the ground, or he could gain the utmost pinnacle of the loftiest tropical giant with the ease and swiftness of a squirrel.
Take that Johnny Weissmuller!
The forest in this Tarzan is a lush playground for the team of Disney animators. Using a new technique called "deep canvas" (which allows 2-D hand-drawn characters to exist seamlessly in a fully 3-D environment), they take viewers on a wild ride through the treetops.
In fact, the whole movie zips along, clocking in at a breathless 88 minutes. It skims over the backstory of how Tarzan’s parents were killed and his subsequent adoption by the ape tribe (Burroughs’ graphic violence would undoubtedly have lost the kiddie market), giving us a dialogue-free opening montage with a touchy-feely Phil Collins song. Surprisingly, the music isn’t as hard to take as Disney’s other recent Broadway-style bombast. There’s only a couple of stop-the-action-while-we-sing numbers and, overall, I liked the tunes (though my wife and kids groaned every time the radio-saturated "You’ll Be In My Heart" came on).
For all its daring with new animation techniques, however, the Disney team still plays it safe with the tried-and-true formula that has, over the past decade, earned the CEOs enough clams to buy a medium-sized country in Europe. It wouldn’t be Disney without the comic sidekicks (Rosie O’Donnell as a wise-cracking ape and Wayne Knight as a dumb-as-coconuts elephant), the trite "Circle of Life" morality and the conflict-supplying villain (who here seems unnecessarily tacked on in an ending that suddenly changes course).
Let’s not forget, however, that the Disney machine is, at its mouse-eared heart, designed for kids. They could care less about animation technique, character development or plot resolution. They just want to know if Tarzan’s a righteous dude who shreds along the vines. Yep, this one should have them yodeling with delight.
The legend of Tarzan is told in breathtaking fashion from the loss of his parents in Africa to his adoption by a gorilla mother Kala to his rescue of ...More at Family Video
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