Tarzan **** (1999, voices of Tony Goldwyn, Alex D Linz, Minnie Driver, Glenn Close, Rosie O’Donnell) – Classic Movie Review 2669

Directed by Chris Buck and Kevin Lima, the 1999 Tarzan is Walt Disney’s last box office triumph of its renaissance period before its decline in the early 2000s. Phil Collins won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song For the song ‘You’ll Be In My Heart’ and won a Grammy for Best Soundtrack Album as artist and producer.

The 37th film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics is the only major animated film of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s story Tarzan of the Apes. It is rightly renowned for its spirited animation, eye-catching background work, brisk pace and exciting action set pieces.

The screenplay by Tab Murphy, Bob Tzudiker, and Noni White finds new mileage in the well-known story, doing a grand job of what must be a difficult task in adapting the book for an animation. The plot focuses on the element of the boy who was raised as an orphan by an ape named Kala becoming a man and being challenged to decide where he really belongs when he discovers he is a human when he is rescued by Jane Porter, and English girl on an expedition. This is the first Tarzan movie were the apes that adopt him are gorillas instead of chimpanzees.

The movie features the voices of Tony Goldwyn and Alex D Linz (young) as Tarzan, Minnie Driver as Jane Porter, Glenn Close as Kala, Tarzan’s adopted ape mother, and Rosie O’Donnell as Terk, Tarzan’s best friend, a smart-alec tomboy gorilla.

O’Donnell accomplished a lifelong dream of voicing a character in a Disney animated movie, but her character of Terk was written as female and she stepped in when none of the male actors auditioned for the part clicked.

Also in the voice cast are the booming Brian Blessed as the film’s villain Clayton, an impatient hunter, the gruff Lance Henriksen as Kerchak, Kala’s mate, Wayne Knight as paranoid elephant Tantor and Nigel Hawthorne as Professor Archimedes Q Porter, Jane’s short-sized, eccentric biologist father. Blessed also provides the Tarzan yell.

Until topped by Disney’s $140million Treasure Planet in 2002, it was the most expensive animated film ever made at a $130million cost. But the film grossed $448.2 million worldwide and was the first Disney animation to open at number one at the American box office since Pocahontas in 1995.

A Broadway musical version followed in 2006, running for over a year.

The film contains numerous references to the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films (starting with Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932) including a ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane’ introduction scene, Tarzan wrestling with crocodiles and Jane’s costume  resembling Maureen O’Sullivan’s.

The Disney animators hired a professor of anatomy to help them with Tarzan’s muscles. He superimposed the correct type of muscles over their drawings to show them how to depict a man at the peak of his physical prowess.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2669

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