*incoherent drooling due to the quality of the animation*

Rating: Null/10 (24 November 2015)

This movie is gorgeous! It makes me wish I was a better poet so I could do it justice with words. It is the reason why man makes pictures with colours. I could take any single frame, especially any single background, hang it on my wall and be perfectly happy with it. It's beautiful beyond words, beyond my ability to express it properly.
It's also the end of an era. The last film of the Disney Renaissance. There are still good Disney films to come, but never again have we had such a streak of quality, of ambition and willingness to push the limits of what you can do with animation. And as far as I'm concerned, they could have done a lot worse than this film as a swan song. They took a relatively simple, yet classic book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which is very clearly a product of its time, and updated it to the next millennium. A man raised in the jungles of Africa and meeting people like him for the first time in his life is a brilliant basic idea for a story and Disney utilizes it beautifully, giving us a tale full of excitement, interesting characters, emotions, adventure, plots and betrayals, love and learning, courage and above all understanding.
They've also updated the characters a little bit. Tarzan isn't quite as masculine and demigod-ish as he is in the book, and Jane isn't just a damsel to be rescued. Jane's father, the professor, is essentially the same though, which isn't a problem as his role is rather minimal, whereas the gorillas have been given some actual roles and characteristics. Unfortunately they failed Clayton utterly as a character, which is the only real problem with the film. I get that they needed a clearly defined villain for the film, but they have made layered villains before. Judge Frollo and Scar, for example. Both were clearly the villains of their films, but they had complicated motivations and were willing to utilize every advantage they had. Clayton is simply a big white hunter with a huge gun. Nothing interesting about that.
Plus I'm personally rather annoyed by Rosie O'Donnell's Terk, but that's just me. The character is objectively just fine.
All in all Tarzan fails to reach that all around perfection movies such as Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King have, but it's still one of my favourite Disney films, and definitely one of the best looking. The music is also great, the characters are great - with one glaring exception - and overall it's definitely under-appreciated for its sheer quality.