Tarzan Review
by Ronald O. Christian (ronc AT europa DOT com)June 22nd, 1999
Sometimes, a movie goes so far beyond political correctness that it becomes necessary to coin a new term to describe the bizarre gyrations a movie studio will undertake to avoid offending the professionally offended. In my opinion, a good candidate for this new term is "tarzan", as in: "That movie was tarzan from end to end" and "man, they really tarzanned that one up".
Mind you, the visuals of Disney's new animated Tarzan are often lush, and the hardware assisted graphics are mind boggling. In fact, the only times where the animation falls short, where it gets most saturday-morning-ish, are the very times when the movie is at it's most obsequious. It's almost as if two animation teams worked on the film; one from a major motion picture studio, and one from Darkwing Duck.
Tarzan is, thankfully, entirely free of the dreary, unrelenting potty humor that has plagued recent Disney releases. Although the humor is usually forced and often embarrassing, it doesn't stoop to the stygian depths of My Favorite Martian, or even the mild anal references in Flubber. Tarzan, in fact, has the antiseptic quality of early Disney cartoons. Back when they were, you know, good.
But what Disney studios did to the story, and for what (apparent) reasons, is something that should never happen to a major novel.
Tarzan of the Apes, published in 1912, was the first novel in a series that eventually became 30-odd novels, books of short stories, and juveniles. In this story, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, and his young wife are abandoned on an African beach by mutineers. Clayton does the best he can for his young bride, but eventually, some time after giving birth to a son, she succumbs to madness and death.
Nearby dwell a tribe of the "near exinct" (and probably fictional) "great apes" the "largest and most ferocious" of the simians. Their leader is the bloodthirsty Kerchak, a huge bull ape prone to episodes of sudden uncontrollable rage. It was during one of these episodes that he attacks Kala, a young female in his tribe, and causes the death of her child.
Inevitably, the tribe finds Clayton's cabin, and Kerchak himself kills John Clayton as he sits in deep depression after his wife's death. The apes explore the cabin, and Kala finds Clayton's young son still alive in the crib, next to the body of his mother. Nearly mad with grief over the loss of her own cub, Kala takes the young child to raise as her own, calling him Tarzan. Tublat, Kala's mate, appeals to Kerchak (during one of his more lucid moments) to force Kala to give up the hairless ape, but Kala threatens to leave the tribe, and Kerchak is reluctant to lose her.
Tarzan, of course, grows up with the apes, learning to use his greater intelligence and natural curiosity to compensate for his lack of brute strength and natural armament. At ten years old, his curiosity leads him to his unknown father's cabin, where he finds the hunting knife which would be the means of his salvation when he's attacked soon after by a huge gorilla. Tarzan narrowly escapes death and makes his first great kill.
Years later, when Kerchak flys into one of his famous rages, Tarzan kills him and assumes leadership of the tribe.
The story is told from an ape's point of view, using words in the (again, fictional) ape language to describe the world around Tarzan. Hence, we have Numa, the lion, Sheeta, the panther, Tantor, the elephant, Gora, the moon. Tarzan lives with the apes, but differs mainly in his intelligence, practical jokes, and preference for fresh meat which he has killed himself, as opposed to the grubs and carrion preferred by the rest of the tribe.
When Tarzan reaches adulthood, a wandering tribe of cannibals moves into the neighborhood. When Kala is killed by Kulonga, the son of Chief Mbonga of the cannibal tribe, a bloody feud is begun between Tarzan and the tribe that would last for many years. From the tribe, Tarzan steals weapons and his first garments.
Through a bizarre set of circumstances, Tarzan learns to read and write English and speak French but not the other way around.
Later, William Clayton, nephew of Tarzan's father John Clayton, American Jane Porter, her black servant, her father and his assistant land near the cabin to look for an historic buried treasure. When the group is threatened by jungle animals, a renegade from Kerchak's tribe, cannibals and pirates, Tarzan must save them repeatedly. A love triangle develops between William Clayton, Jane, and Tarzan that is not resolved by the novel's conclusion. Eventually, Tarzan follows Jane to civilization. His odd education is filled out along the way, and in the fullness of time he becomes a polished aristocrat with the instincts, strength and reflexes of a savage beast.
That's Tarzan of the Apes in a nutshell. Now, let's let Michael Eisner loose on it.
First of all, we must scour the story clean of any People of Color.
Gone are Jane's servant and all local natives. Disney's Africa is, curiously, completely devoid of Africans, reminding one of Apartheid's "empty land theory". This was, apparently, preferable to showing People of Color in roles that might upset the Terminally Offendable. Or maybe Eisner just doesn't like blacks in his cartoons. I don't know.
Of the lily-white cast, Tarzan's parents lose their objectionable upper-crust heritage and become no-name survivors of a ship fire. William Clayton, Lord Greystoke, Tarzan's cousin, becomes the completely unrelated "Clayton", a standard, paper-thin Disney villian, utterly interchangeable with Governer Rattcliffe and Gaston, ostensibly the guide of Professor Porter. In a great unintentional in-joke, Tarzan, when learning English, mistakenly believes that "Clayton" is the name of the noise made when the villian fires his gun. And that's all Clayton is, in the movie -- an excuse for lots of gunshots.
Guns, of course, are only ever two things: Completely ineffective (the shotgun in Tarzan's luckless parents' cabin) or completely evil (the double barrelled high capacity elephant-machine-gun wielded by Clayton). Clayton "searches for apes" by shooting at anything that makes a sound. Just what you always wanted in a guide.
Professor and Jane Porter are transformed from treasure seekers to naturalists in search of gorrillas to study. Burroughs' "great apes" become Gorillas In The Mist. Tublat is gone, and Kerchak (now a silverback Gorilla) takes his place as Tarzan's wise, noble, adopted father. Just as Clayton and his henchmen are intolerably bad, the gorillas are intolerably good and noble and just. You can't have any shades of grey in a Disney movie, no sir. Nor can you have animals acting like, well you know, animals.
True to Disney formula, Tarzan is saddled with two wisecracking sidekicks, an embarrassed sounding Wayne Knight as Tantor The Anxiety-Ridden Elephant, and in probably the most annoying role in her career, a screechy, wisecracking Rosie O'Donnell as Terk, a midget ape with bad hair. In a minor divergance from formula, the sidekicks are not at Tarzan's side for the entire movie, but true to the Disney vision, they contribute nothing to the plot except some really painful attempts at humor and one completely improbable rescue.
Thankfully, Tarzan isn't a musical as such, with the exceptions of a brief bedtime song from Kala to young Tarzan, and a really horrible be-bop number by Rosie O'Donnell that stops the story dead and is guaranteed to make you squirm in your seat. An excellent time for a potty break.
Phil Collins tunes comprise most of the background music, and are decent enough to almost make me want to buy the album.
As mentioned above, Burroughs' Tarzan subsists mostly on meat he has killed himself. Disney's Tarzan, true to nineties sensibilities, eats only fruit and appears to be completely non-violent, killing nothing during the movie's 88 minutes, not even nasty old meat-eating Sheeta, the panther, who expires bloodlessly by accidentally falling on Tarzan's spear offscreen. In all of Tarzan's altercations, his main strategy seems to be to keep his opponant occupied until said opponant accidentally hurts himself.
There are ragged scraps of the original story in there someplace, and indeed, Disney's Tarzan retains more of Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes than most of the 30-odd Tarzan movies that preceeded it. Some of the action scenes are amazing. But while Disney has retained cosmetic similarities, they've torn the guts out of the story, leaving only a good looking, unoffensive corpse in it's place.
In fact, what is left is no more or less than a gender-switched Pocahontas, with the same basic plot, character types, and a slightly different ending.
Burroughs is on record as saying that his Tarzan character could best be realized in animation, and this latest effort shows the potential of the medium to tell the story of the displaced Lord Greystoke. Perhaps some day we will see an effort from some other studio (perhaps one of the Anime teams?) that hasn't been deliberately neutered.
Score: One star of four for spectacular computer-assisted animation, a few great action sequences, and some decent backgroup music. Should have been two stars, but I had to subtract one for general annoyance.
Ron ([email protected])
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
