Tarzan (1999 film)

Tarzan is a 1999 American animated coming-of-age[3] adventure comedy-drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is based on the 1912 story Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, being the first animated major motion picture version of the story. The film was directed by Kevin Lima and Chris Buck (in his feature directorial debut) and produced by Bonnie Arnold, from a screenplay by Tab Murphy and the writing team of Bob Tzudiker and Noni White. It stars the voices of Tony Goldwyn, Minnie Driver, Glenn Close, Rosie O'Donnell, Brian Blessed, Lance Henriksen, Wayne Knight, and Nigel Hawthorne.
Pre-production of Tarzan began in 1995, with Lima selected as director[4] and Buck joining him the same year. Following Murphy's first draft, Tzudiker, White, and Dave Reynolds (who was uncredited in the final cut), were brought in to reconstruct the third act and add additional material to the screenplay. English recording artist Phil Collins was recruited to compose and record songs integrated with a score by Mark Mancina. Meanwhile, the production team embarked on a research trip to Uganda and Kenya to study the gorillas. The animation of the film combines 2D hand-drawn animation with the extensive use of computer-generated imagery, and it was done in California, Orlando, and Paris, with the pioneering computer animation software system Deep Canvas being predominantly used to create three-dimensional backgrounds.
Tarzan premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on June 12, 1999, and was released in the United States on June 16. It received positive reviews from critics, who praised its voice performances, music, animation, and action sequences. Against a production budget of $130 million (then the most expensive traditionally animated film ever made until Treasure Planet in 2002), the film grossed $448.2 million worldwide, becoming the fifth highest-grossing film of 1999, the second highest-grossing animated film of 1999 behind Toy Story 2, and the first Disney animated feature to open at first place at the North American box office since Pocahontas (1995). It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song ("You'll Be in My Heart" by Phil Collins). The film has led to many derived works, such as a Broadway adaptation, a television series, and two direct-to-video followups, Tarzan & Jane (2002) and Tarzan II (2005). Due to licensing issues with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the use of these characters are limited.[5]
== Plot[edit] ==
In the 1880s, a British couple and their infant son are shipwrecked in Equatorial Africa. The adults build a treehouse but are killed by a leopard named Sabor. Kala, a local gorilla who lost her son to Sabor, adopts the human infant and names him Tarzan despite the protestations of Kerchak, her mate and the gorilla leader.
After growing into a child, Tarzan begins to befriend other animals, including Kala's niece Terk and the paranoid elephant, Tantor. Tarzan finds himself treated differently because of his different physique, so he makes valiant efforts to improve himself. Several years later, an adult Tarzan rescues the gorillas by spearing Sabor, gaining Kerchak's reluctant approval.
Meanwhile, a team of English human explorers, consisting of Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, his daughter Jane, and their hunter escort Clayton, arrive on the island to study the gorillas. Jane accidentally becomes separated from the group and is chased by a baboon troop, until a curious Tarzan rescues her. After comparing her to himself, he realizes their similarities. Jane leads Tarzan back to their camp, where Porter and Clayton both take interest in him; the former in terms of scientific progress, while the latter hopes to have Tarzan lead the group to the gorillas. Despite Kerchak's warnings to avoid the strangers, Tarzan repeatedly returns to the camp. Porter, Clayton, and Jane teach him how to speak English properly, and tell him what the human world is like. Tarzan and Jane begin a romantic relationship; however, she has difficulty convincing Tarzan to lead the humans to the gorillas, as Tarzan fears Kerchak's fury.
With the explorers' ship returning to retrieve them, Jane asks Tarzan to return with them to England, but Tarzan, in turn, asks Jane to stay with him when Jane says it is unlikely that they will ever return. Clayton convinces Tarzan to lead the humans to the gorillas in exchange for Jane staying with him forever. Tarzan persuades Terk and Tantor to lure Kerchak away, and leads the trio to the nesting grounds. Porter and Jane are excited to mingle with the gorillas, but Kerchak returns to attack the humans. Tarzan restrains Kerchak while the humans escape, disappointing Kerchak. Taking Tarzan to the treehouse where she found him, Kala reveals his true past, and says she wants him to be happy whatever he decides.
In the morning, Tarzan boards the ship, accompanied by Jane and Porter, but the three are ambushed by Clayton and his traitorous band of stowaway thugs. Now aware of the location of the nesting grounds, Clayton plans to capture and sell the gorillas for a fortune, and imprisons Tarzan, Jane, and Porter to prevent them from interfering. Tarzan escapes with the help of Terk and Tantor, and he rallies the other animals to help the gorillas fight the thugs. Clayton grazes Tarzan's arm, and mortally wounds Kerchak and pursues Tarzan across the treetops. The ensuing battle leads to Clayton inadvertently hanging himself with a vine. Before Kerchak dies, he accepts Tarzan as his son and names him the gorilla troop's leader.
The next day, Porter and Jane prepare to leave on the ship, while Tarzan stays behind with the gorillas. As the ship's rowboat leaves shore, Porter encourages his daughter to stay with the man she loves, and Jane jumps overboard, followed soon after by her father. The Porters reunite with Tarzan and his family, and embark on their new life together.
== Voice cast[edit] ==
* Tony Goldwyn as Tarzan, a 20-year-old man raised by gorillas who finds his human roots. Glen Keane served as the supervising animator for Tarzan as an adult, while John Ripa animated Tarzan as an infant and a 6-year-old child. John Ripa studied the movements of young chimpanzees to use for young Tarzan's animation, while Glen Keane used movements of a gibbon and used it for the animation of adult Tarzan. Keane also watched his son Max Keane do his skateboarding and snowboarding and used surfers moves in the scenes where Tarzan is sliding through the trees.[6] Brendan Fraser auditioned twice for the title character before portraying the lead role in George of the Jungle (1997).[7] Tony Goldwyn auditioned for the title role as well, and according to co-director Kevin Lima, Goldwyn landed it because of "the animal sense" in his readings, along with some "killer baboon imitations".[8]
:* Alex D. Linz as young Tarzan
* Minnie Driver as Jane Porter, the eccentric, feisty, benevolent, and intelligent daughter of Professor Porter. She is the first of the group to encounter Tarzan and becomes his love interest. Ken Duncan served as the supervising animator for Jane. Many of Driver's mannerisms and characteristics were incorporated into Jane's animation. The scene where Jane describes meeting Tarzan for the first time to her father and Clayton was improvised by Driver, resulting in Duncan animating one of the longest animated scenes on record. The scene took 7 weeks to animate and 73 feet of film.[9]
* Glenn Close as Kala, Tarzan's adoptive mother, who found and raised him after losing her biological son to Sabor. She is also Kerchak's mate. Russ Edmonds served as the supervising animator for Kala.
* Rosie O'Donnell as Terk (short for Terkina, a feminization of Terkoz merged with Teeka), Tarzan's best friend, a wisecracking gorilla. She is also Kala and Kerchak's niece, making her and Tarzan adoptive cousins. Michael Surrey served as the supervising animator for Terk. The character was originally written as a male gorilla, but after O'Donnell's audition, Terk was re-characterized as a female.[10]
* Brian Blessed as William Cecil Clayton, an intelligent and suave yet arrogant and treacherous hunter, who assists the Porters on their quest. Randy Haycock served as the supervising animator for Clayton, basing his design on Clark Gable and other film stars of the 1930s and 40s. Blessed also provided the iconic Tarzan yell for the title character.[11]
* Nigel Hawthorne as Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, an eccentric, short-statured scientist and Jane's father. Dave Burgess served as the supervising animator for Porter. This was one of Hawthorne's two final acting roles before his death in 2001.
* Lance Henriksen as Kerchak, Kala's mate and Tarzan's (reluctant) adoptive father, a silverback and leader of the gorilla troop, who struggles to accept Tarzan since he is a human. Bruce W. Smith served as the supervising animator for Kerchak.
* Wayne Knight as Tantor, a paranoid and submissive elephant, and Tarzan and Terk's close friend. Sergio Pablos served as the supervising animator for Tantor. Woody Allen was initially cast as Tantor, but Jeffrey Katzenberg persuaded Allen to leave the project and join DreamWorks' Antz (1998).[12]
:* Taylor Dempsey as young Tantor.
== Production[edit] ==
=== Development[edit] ===
Disney's Tarzan was the first Tarzan film to be animated.[13] Thomas Schumacher, then-president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, expressed surprise there hadn't been any previous attempts to animate a Tarzan film, saying, "Here is a book that cries out to be animated. Yet we're the first filmmakers to have ever taken Tarzan from page to screen and presented the character as Burroughs intended." He noted that in animated form, Tarzan can connect to the animals on a deeper level than he can in live-action versions.[14]
In 1994, when A Goofy Movie (1995) was nearly finished, Kevin Lima was approached to direct Tarzan by then-studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. He had desired to have the film animated through the Disney Television Animation division with a new animation studio established in Canada. Lima was reluctant to the idea because of the animation complexities being done by inexperienced animators. Following Katzenberg's resignation from the Walt Disney Company, Lima was again contacted about the project by Michael Eisner, who decided to have the film produced through the Feature Animation division, by which Lima signed on.[15]
Following this, Lima decided to read Tarzan of the Apes where he began to visualize the theme of two hands being held up against each other.[16] That image became an important symbol of the relationships between characters in the film, and a metaphor of Tarzan's search for identity. "I was looking for something that would underscore Tarzan's sense of being alike, yet different from his ape family", Lima said, "The image of touching hands was first conceived as an idea for how Tarzan realizes he and Jane are physically the same."[16]
Following his two-month study of the book, Lima approached his friend, Chris Buck, who had just wrapped up work as a supervising animator on Pocahontas (1995), to ask if he would be interested in serving as co-director. Buck was initially skeptical but accepted after hearing Lima's ideas for the film.[17] By April 1995, the Los Angeles Times reported that the film was in its preliminary stages with Lima and Buck directing after Disney had obtained the story rights from the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs.[18]
=== Writing[edit] ===
Tab Murphy, who had just finished work on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), was attracted to the theme of man-versus-nature in Tarzan, and began developing a treatment in January 1995. For the third act, Murphy suggested that Tarzan should leave for England, as he did in the book, but the directors felt that it was incompatible with their central theme of what defines a family.[19] In order to keep Tarzan in the jungle, the third act needed to be restructured by redefining the role of the villain and inventing a way to endanger the gorillas. In this departure from Burroughs' novel, a villain named Clayton was created to serve as a guide for Professor Archimedes Q. Porter and his daughter, Jane.[20] In addition to this, Kerchak was re-characterized from a savage silverback into the protector of the gorilla tribe.[21]
In January 1997, husband-and-wife screenwriting duo Bob Tzudiker and Noni White were hired to help refocus and add humor to the script as a way to balance the emotional weight of the film.[22] Comedy writer Dave Reynolds was also brought on to write humorous dialogue for the film.[23] "I was initially hired on for six weeks of rewriting and punch-up", Reynolds said, "A year and a half later, I finished. Either they liked my work, or I was very bad at time management."[24] One challenge the writers faced was how Tarzan should learn about his past. "When Kala takes Tarzan back to the tree house, she is essentially telling him that he was adopted", Bonnie Arnold, the producer for Tarzan, said, "This is necessitated by him encountering humans and recognizing he is one of them." As a way to explore the feelings in that scene, Arnold brought in adoptive parents to talk with the story team.[25]
=== Animation[edit] ===
The animators were split into two teams, one in Paris and one in Burbank. The 6000-mile distance and difference in time zones posed challenges for collaboration, especially for scenes with Tarzan and Jane. Glen Keane was the supervising animator for Tarzan at the Paris studio, while Ken Duncan was the supervising animator for Jane at the studio in Burbank. To make coordinating scenes with multiple characters easier, the animators used a system called a "scene machine" that could send rough drawings between the two animation studios.[26] Meanwhile, following production on Mulan (1998), two hundred animators at Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida provided character animation and special effects animation where the filmmakers had to discuss their work through daily video conferences among the three studios.[27]
Keane was inspired to make Tarzan "surf" through the trees because of his son's interest in extreme sports, and he began working on a test scene. The directors expressed concern that Tarzan would be made into a "surfer dude".[28] In October 1996, Keane revealed the test animation to them, which they liked it enough that it was used during the "Son of Man" sequence, with movements inspired by skateboarder Tony Hawk.[29] Although Keane initially thought that Tarzan would be easy to animate because he only wears a loincloth, he realized that he would need a fully working human musculature while still being able to move like an animal. To figure out Tarzan's movements, the Paris animation team studied different animals in order to transpose their movements onto him. They also consulted with a professor of anatomy. This resulted in Tarzan being the first Disney character to accurately display working muscles.[30]
To prepare for animating the gorillas, the animation team attended lectures on primates, made trips to zoos, and studied nature documentaries, with a group of animators also witnessing a gorilla dissection to learn about their musculature. In March 1996, the production team began a two-week safari in Kenya to take reference photographs and observe the animals. On the trip, they visited Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda to view mountain gorillas in the wild, and get inspiration for the setting.[31] In 2000, Chris Buck repeated the journey accompanied by journalists to promote the film's home video release.[32]
To create the sweeping 3D backgrounds, Tarzan's production team developed a 3D painting and rendering technique known as Deep Canvas (a term coined by artist/engineer Eric Daniels).[33] This technique allows artists to produce CGI backgrounds that look like a traditional painting, according to art director Daniel St. Pierre.[33] (The software keeps track of brushstrokes applied in 3D space.)[33] For this advancement, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the creators of Deep Canvas a Technical Achievement Award in 2003. After Tarzan, Deep Canvas was used for a number of sequences in Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), particularly large panoramic shots of the island and several action sequences. Expanded to support moving objects as part of the background, Deep Canvas was used to create about 75 percent of the environments in Disney's next major animated action film, Treasure Planet (2002).
== Music[edit] ==
Main article: Tarzan (1999 soundtrack)
In 1995, Phil Collins was initially brought onto the project as a songwriter following a recommendation by Disney music executive Chris Montan. Early into production, directors Kevin Lima and Chris Buck decided not to follow Disney's musical tradition by having the characters sing. "I did not want Tarzan to sing", Lima stated, "I just couldn't see this half-naked man sitting on a branch breaking out in song. I thought it would be ridiculous."[7] Instead, Collins would perform the songs in the film serving as the narrator.[34][35] The choice of Collins, a popular and well established adult contemporary artist, led to comparisons with Elton John's earlier music for The Lion King (1994).[36] Tarzan was dubbed in thirty-five languages—the most for any Disney movie at the time,[37] and Collins recorded his songs in French, Italian, German, and Spanish for the dubbed versions of the film's soundtrack.[37][38] According to Collins, most of the songs he wrote for Tarzan came from improvisation sessions and his reactions while reading the treatment. Three of the songs he wrote—"Son of Man", "Trashin' the Camp", and "Strangers Like Me"—were based on his initial impressions after he read the source material.[39] The other two songs were "You'll Be in My Heart", a lullaby sung to Tarzan by Kala (voiced by Glenn Close), and "Two Worlds", a song Collins wrote to serve as the anthem for Tarzan.[40]
The instrumental scoring for the film was composed by Mark Mancina, who had previously produced music for The Lion King (1994), and the musical of the same name. Mancina and Collins worked closely to create music that would complement the film's setting and used many obscure instruments from Mancina's personal collection in the score.[41] "The idea of score and song arrangement came together as one entity, as Phil and I worked in tandem to create what's heard in the film", Mancina said.[41]
== Release[edit] ==
On June 12, 1999, the film premiered at the El Capitan Theater with the cast and filmmakers as attendees followed by a forty-minute concert with Phil Collins performing songs from the film.[42] On July 23, 1999, Disney launched a digital projection release of Tarzan released only in three theatrical venues including Walt Disney World's Pleasure Island multiplex for three weeks. Although Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and An Ideal Husband had been given earlier digital projection releases despite being shot on photographic film, Tarzan was notable for being the first major feature release to have been produced, mastered, and projected digitally.[43][44]
=== Marketing[edit] ===
Disney Consumer Products released a series of toys, books, and stuffed animals for Tarzan, partnering with Mattel to produce a line of plush toys and action figures.[45] Mattel also produced the Rad Repeatin' Tarzan action figure, but discontinued it after complaints regarding the toy's onanistic arm motions.[46] Continuing its advertising alliance with McDonald's, its promotional campaign began on the film's opening day with several toys accompanied with Happy Meals and soda straws that replicated the Tarzan yell.[47] Disney also worked with Nestle to create Tarzan themed candies, including a banana-flavored chocolate bar.[48] In early 2000, Disney partnered again with McDonald's to release a set of eight Happy Meal toys as a tie-in for the film's home video.[49] They also offered Tarzan themed food options, such as banana sundaes and jungle burgers.[50]
=== Home media[edit] ===
On February 1, 2000, the film was released on VHS