Squeezing a Cash Cow Dry

Rating: 2/10 (3 February 2000)

This film represents everything wrong with the Disney money machine. It plays like a set up for an animated, Saturday morning cartoon show. It feels like an attempt to remake (and cash in on) the success of Disney's own 'The Lion King.'
That said, the animation is wonderful. Tarzan himself is AMAZINGLY WELL ANIMATED and the violence is handled as well as I've ever seen in a Disney feature. The computer animation and cell animation work very well together, but the pacing, story and the out of place music ruin what might have been a good animated telling of the Tarzan legend.
I grew up reading the Tarzan books. I loved them. They rank right up there with other "young adult" fiction like "Treasure Island" and "The Wizard of Oz." All of these books are classics for a reason -- they are good. They are great as they are, and terrible when rewritten. I am aware that a film (especially one aimed at an "all ages" audience with a running time under two hours) can't tell the story in the same way as the book. Movies must trim things. But to trim the story to the point that there is almost nothing of the original left is an insult to the audience paying to see a film based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic. What makes it even worse is all the stuff that was ADDED to the story. None of it any good. What's left isn't 'Tarzan', but something else masquerading as it.
This movie was well animated, but lacked an interesting story based on the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs (who created Tarzan in his "pulp" novels). It plays out more like a music video for the first ten minutes and when it finally slows down and tries to actually tell it's story, it mucks it all up with irritating animal characters (voiced by talented people) spewing forth some of the worse dialogue I've ever heard in a Disney feature. The whole film plays like an attempt to capitalize on 'The Lion King' formula. Almost none of the jokes are funny and even fewer characters are memorable. This movie is only slightly better than the Bo Derek version ('Tarzan the Ape Man').
I feel sorry for the animators, because ever 15 minutes or so there was a scene that felt "right." Unfortunately, each of these scenes is lost in a formulaic mess of a movie. I kept getting the feeling that each of these "good" scenes (like Tarzan fighting the leopard or the death of the villain) was what the animators WANTED the whole film to be like, but the Disney executives just wouldn't let them play ball. It is with a head hung low that I say that I would recommend this film to NO ONE.
Watch 'The Jungle Book' instead. Only loosely based on it's source material as well, but infinitely more entertaining, with one memorable scene after another (and GREAT songs)!