Animation is its strongest point, plot is not

Rating: 6/10 (22 March 2015)

Tarzan is a beautifully animated film (or at least the hand-drawn segments, but we will get to that later) and it has some of the fastest and most fluid movement from a Disney film in a very long time. The action and the pacing is very nice and the colors are all very vibrant, with very nice shading to boot. The human characters are also half of the fun of this movie. Just the way they move and how fast everyone interacts with each other is entertaining.
However, Tarzan is not without some fairly major flaws.
The biggest problem is the movie's plot. I know this is going off of some old material, but they aren't even following the original story very closely so it could've been improved. You can see where the movie is going almost a mile away and it has the same old cliché: "I'm a protective father who is super conservative and old fashioned and won't risk my people for your ways" kind of deal. This kind of thing has been done more frequently AFTER this film was released, but it wasn't an uncommon theme beforehand... I mean... Pocahontas. And of course you know Tarzan is going to do something that will make everyone mad at him, but then Tarzan will have to redeem himself and... you get the drift. Fortunately, this movie is so fast paced that it doesn't even get caught in those boring details and these clichés wizz by super fast. All in all, Tarzan's plot is very weak and the bad guy is... hilariously obvious and I'm even more surprised that Jane and her father didn't even notice how obsessed he was with gorillas... not even slightly suspicious. Overall, I like Clayton's design and his character, but he isn't a truly deep or interesting villain.
Regardless of the villain, the other characters have a lot of issues. Almost every character in this movie is a one-dimensional or a two-dimensional character. You have some depth with Tarzan, and maybe a little bit with Jane, but because the movie thinks that montages are equivalent to character development, you never really get any on- screen development. You see the characters before and after the development, but rarely during. This hurts Jane's and Tarzan's relationship the most. In Aladdin it kind of worked because Jasmine already kind of liked Aladdin and recognized that it was probably him. They already had chemistry between each other and they sang a duet. However, when the Tarzan equivalent is a montage and the only romantic part is roughly 20 seconds long... you have almost no chemistry.
All of the human characters seemed to have been cast fairly well (not sure about Tarzan, but he sounds fine) but a lot of the animal characters sound... not like their animated characters. Tarzan's "father" has a voice that sounds a little too high and clear for someone who is supposed to be a massive, giant, powerful gorilla. Terk's gender is almost impossible to tell until you watch the movie long enough. Almost everyone I know who has seen this movie thought Terk was a boy. And there are a couple of other examples of voices that don't seem to fit their characters.
The hand-drawn animation in this movie is fantastic. There is no arguing it is some of Disney's best as far as individual characters go. However, almost everything outside of the characters is CGI or painted background... on a CGI plane. This sounds like a minor complaint, but it becomes rather annoying when you start to feel like you are watching a CGI film with hand-drawn characters instead of a hand-drawn film with CGI elements.
Now, regarding the soundtrack... this is probably the most infamous aspect of this movie... the Phil Collins soundtrack. Don't get me wrong, there are MOMENTS in the songs that work perfectly with the visual imagery. There are times where the music lines up with the atmosphere but... it sounds so ridiculous and over the top that it makes it hard to take the movie seriously. This is much like the voice-casting of the movie: In some areas it works, in other areas it makes absolutely no sense.
That actually sums up the movie pretty well: A movie that knows what it is doing in some areas, and has absolutely no idea in other areas. Certain scenes/songs come completely out of nowhere and are merely filler, almost all character development happens over montages, the animation is split between CGI and hand-drawn, half of the characters are voiced nicely while the other half aren't, and sometimes the movie is nicely paced while other times it is incredibly rushed. This is a movie that could've been much more entertaining than it was and much more interesting, but it falls into so many clichés and generic story-telling elements that it doesn't feel like a really special film.