Be Black Baby

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 2012)

As with most of Disney's animated films, "Tarzan" sports about 4 or 5 minutes of magic amidst 90 minutes of formula. Based on a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film is mostly interesting for its political correctness; Disney's Tarzan is post-imperial, post-racist, post-classist and post-masculine. He's a puppy.
Burrough's Tarzan – which means "white skin" in ape speak - was published when the United States was just becoming an Imperial Power. The British Empire, meanwhile, ruled a large chunk of the planet. White Supremeacy was the norm, and Burroughs himself believed in a hierarchy of race and class and was vocal in both his belief in the innate superiority of Anglo-Saxons and the perils of "yellow Asians" and "black savagery". Tapping into this, Burrough's wrote of two "heroes", one called Tarzan and one called John Carter of Mars, both exemplars of sexy, topless, Anglo-Saxon masculinity. Both were descendants of aristocracy, Tarzan the heir to an aristocratic English family and Carter an upper-class Virginian. Both then found themselves taken away from the white ruling class, stripped of all advantages and thrown headlong into primitive environments (the savagery of Africa for Tarzan, the cultural exhaustion of a prim-and-proper Mars for Carter), such that the intrinsic superiority of their breed may be demonstrated and they may prove their innate royalty.
At the time, it was common to equate non whites with apes and lowly animals (everyone from Darwin to Jefferson deliberately or indirectly contributed to this feeling). These non white characters were typically portrayed as having a mystical rapport with animals, thanks to their "perceived proximity on the evolutionary scale". With Tarzan, though, Burrough's created a Great White Hope who is closer to the animals than the black Africans of the jungles and more civilised than the whites of the cities. He was at once both more civilised and more primal than the native; both Green Hornet and Kato, Lone Ranger and Tonto, more black and white than anyone will ever be, a British Lord and white king of the African Jungle. Indeed, your typical Tarzan story back in the days would have Tarzan literally eating black natives or shooting black cannibals with arrows in order to rescue white poachers so that they may be punished in "civilised" courts of justice; simultaneously more civic and more savage.
Of course, as time went on, Tarzan changed. Successive films and stories softened the character, morphing him from a simple feral child (ie "Jungle Book") to a lost pup to a jungle ecowarrior to a pastoral shepherd who strives to preserve the natural idyll of the jungle from the corruptive influence of civilisation. Disney's version of the tale takes this further. Their Tarzan isn't just a politically correct eco-warrior – there are no locals in Disney's Africa, and gone are all the Darwinist connotations – but has none of the aristocratic origins of the original Tarzan. Interestingly, Disney's African jungle is uninhabited by humans until Colonialists arrive and Tarzan becomes the alpha male of a monkey tribe. In this way, Tarzan becomes the first man of the jungle whilst the "white skin" becomes the first victim of Colonialists in Africa. The film climaxes with Tarzan "killing" a bad, white Colonialists (your typical "Avatar"/Disney's "Atlantis" military villain), but again the film is so determined to cover its tracks that the guy's death is ultimately an accident incurred when Tarzan tries but fails to save him; again, Tarzan's at once totally savage and civic.
Beyond this the film contains a number of excellent sequences, like one in which Tarzan battles jungle animals, flirts with a coy Jane or poses dramatically as he dodges foliage. Disney literally have a sex department that investigates bodies, human responses to sex, poses and body signals, and "Tarzan" continues their tradition of being very slyly, almost subliminally, sexual.
7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.