Jane Porter

**Jane Porter** is the deuteragonist of Disney's 1999 animated feature film, *Tarzan*. She is a charismatic, albeit eccentric ethnologist who travels to Africa to study gorillas alongside her father, Archimedes Q. Porter. During her expedition, Jane meets a "wild man" named Tarzan, with whom she would eventually fall in love.

## Background

Jane is a young woman living in Victoria-era Britain, alongside her father, the esteemed Professor Archimedes Q. Porter. What became of Jane's mother is unknown, though Archimedes briefly mentioned that their daughter takes after her, quite a bit.

At adulthood, Jane became an animal researcher in a field that allows her to work closely with her father. Together, they use their combined resources to garner a better understanding of animal habitats and behavior. Their most ambitious expedition is one taking place in Africa, where a long-awaited journey to study gorillas was to occur.

## Appearance

In *Tarzan*, Jane is a woman in her early 20s with fair skin, blue eyes, and long, brown hair. When she first appears in the movie, her outfit and personality wasn't adapted to the jungle, but as the film moves on, her outfit becomes more revealing as she grows more attached to the jungle to the point that at the end of the movie her appearance is now similar to Tarzan as she now lives in the jungle.

When Jane first appears, she wears a long yellow dress and large yellow bustle with a purple cravat, white gloves, white boots (with black on the soles, toes, and heels, like Mary Jane shoes), white petticoat, white frilly knee-length pantalettes and her hair was in a bun.

Later, when Jane is introducing Tarzan to her father, she wears a yellow shirt with a long green skirt with no shoes, and her hair is let loose.

Her next outfit is of a white tank top with a long, wrapped red skirt, and like her previous outfit her hair is loose and she is barefoot.

By the end of the movie, Jane wears a bikini-like loincloth consisting of only a brownish-red tank top that reveals her midriff and a matching short skirt.

In *The* *Legend of Tarzan*, Jane is almost always wearing her yellow shirt and green skirt as her main outfit, and barefoot, just like what she wore when she introduced Tarzan to her father in the original film, though in some episodes she wears a light green tank top with a green skirt.

## Personality

Despite her origins linking back to upper-class England, Jane is fairly eccentric and spontaneous — not unlike her father. However, she still has a sense of standards and tries to stay true to her roots as an Englishwoman while also adapting to life in the jungle. Overall, Jane is nevertheless intelligent and greatly gifted in her skills as a zoologist and artist; seen several times throughout the film, Jane can conjure an extremely accurate representation of an animal (or even a human, such as Tarzan) and portray it on her sketch board with relative ease and exquisite detail. Though she primarily works from a reference, her sketch of Tarzan was done solely on memory, further exemplifying her talent.

Aside from art, Jane has a passionate admiration for wildlife of all kinds. She generally appreciates and respects the animal kingdom, and takes it as her responsibility to be mindful of their living conditions during her explorations. This led to bitterness between herself and her arrogant guide, Clayton, who continuously doubted Jane's capabilities.

For all of her talents, Jane is far from perfect. She has a habit of getting herself into trouble, and sometimes due to her own arrogance, such as when she teased and taunted a baby baboon, not realizing his aggressive family was nearby and ready to protect their child. Within the jungle, she is also out of her element, meaning she initially had difficulty surviving its perils upon encountering them, forcing her to be saved by Tarzan repeatedly. Interestingly, however, she is somewhat quick to adapt. After her first encounter with Tarzan, Jane grew a natural understanding of the ape-man and the jungle itself. She slowly began to lower her defenses (visualized through her progressive change of attire), became more open-minded to the peculiar world in which she was exploring, and eventually felt her home was not in England but in the jungle itself and with Tarzan.