Tarzan

I’d like to reiterate something I said when I reviewed A Bug’s Life back in November: No one, I mean no one, is going to beat Disney at their own game. While I was in the theater waiting for them to unspool Tarzan (Note to self: catch the next Disney movie later in the evening, to lower the Screaming Kid factor), they showed trailers for a few other animated movies clearly aimed at the same audience. None of them held a candle to Disney’s recent output. Hell, Disney made their update of Inspector Gadget look interesting, and I have zero expectations for that one. But let’s get back to the subject.

Tarzan opens with a British family setting up camp on the African coast after their boat sinks at sea. A gorilla named Kala (voiced by Glenn Close) discovers an orphan in their tree house, the parents seemingly killed by a very nasty leopard named Sabor (Get it? Sabor, saber toothed, ha ha, uh, yeah). Kala had just lost a baby of her own to this same leopard, so she rescues this odd looking baby human thing and calls him Tarzan. (Voiced as an adult by Tony Goldwyn, the bad guy in Ghost) Her mate, the Alpha male Kerchak (Lance Henriksen, star of the recently dropped Millenium), grudgingly takes him in, but makes no effort to welcome him. Tarzan also finds fitting in with the other gorilla kids rather difficult, since he is so much different than they are. Even the one gorilla who is willing to be nice to him, Terk (Rosie O’Donnell, making me wonder how this gorilla learned to sound like a New Yorker) blows him off when the others are around. Tarzan, who wants so desperately to be accepted, does not stop until he is as adept at climbing and hunting as the rest of the group.

And then Jane walks in.

Jane Porter and her professor father (Minnie Driver and Nigel Hawthorne) come waltzing into the woods to see gorillas in their natural habitat. Tarzan is stunned: She’s the same as he is. Now he’s confused, because he didn’t know there were others like him and resents Kala for not telling him. At the same time, he’s got it bad for Jane. Terk and their neurotic elephant friend Tantor (Wayne Knight), are not amused. They want their buddy back.

Tarzan was created using a technology called Deep Canvas, which gives the animation a more 3D feel than traditional ink and paper. This was particularly helpful in the scenes where we get a glimpse of just how good Tarzan is at climbing trees and surfing the boughs (the head animator watched his son skateboarding and used that as his inspiration). The motion is incredibly quick and fascinating. There’s a scene where Tarzan is rescuing Jane from a group of baboons (funny, Rafiki from The Lion King didn’t quite look this vicious) and the action is so fast it’s hard to keep up. The kids are gonna love this. I also loved the Disney self reference they used in this movie (every animated Disney movie contains a character from a previous movie, and the one they used here is subtle), and the "Trashin’ the Camp" sequence was inspired. The creators of Stomp must be proud.

I do have some complaints with Tarzan, though. One, the story is, well, not much of a story. I was very involved while the action was taking place in the jungle, but when the plot shifted to Tarzan going back to England with Jane, it all seemed to go wrong. Two, the villain was, um, too cartoonish. His name is Clayton, he’s the guide for Jane and her father. He has another plan for the gorillas, and I think the movie worked better when the villain was from the jungle, like Sabor. Three, they overdid some of the computer animation. The Deep Canvas stuff was great, but there were some ocean shots that were clearly ‘point and click’ artwork, and it looked wrong.

However, this did not keep me from enjoying the movie overall. Even when the Disney movies lack substance, they pull off something amazing that makes it worthwhile. This will definitely tide me over until Toy Story 2 comes out this fall.