Disney's Tarzan is a superb animation movie, recycling no jokes and debuting new techniques for the "natural" existence of 2D characters in 3D worlds.
Tantor is my favorite Disney animal of all times! What an elephant! This giant baby is really wonderful and so funny! I love Tantor!
Tarzan, the old black and white TV series, was the first show I regularly tried NOT to miss... I was some 6, 7 years old, and I really didn't watch any television, except for the Tarzan episodes and the F1 races. My days were spent killing cats on Mr. Macieira's lands, collecting stamps and devouring books. I was bad (but far from the bone).
This was the mid 1970s, when you could only tune two TV stations (RTP1 and RTP2) in Portugal. Back then, there weren't any of today's mainstream ideas for television; expressions such as "prime time" and "audience share" simply were not born (things should have remained like that, from the jargon POV), so it was kind of a wild media (hard to think of TV like that, these days).
The Tarzan B&W episodes were all about a "classical hero": muscles with a function (not for decoration, you see...), hard and clear right / wrong frontiers, the company of a Jane-girl not that dressed... and the basic "must fight bad-guys" scripts. Cool! But it wasn't the most respectful adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's book...
ERB's Tarzan is about a boy, raised by gorillas, that will fall in love for a human female. This story really has no époque and can be "twisted" to tell any tale. While the B&W TV series made the option to focus on the adult Tarzan, Disney's version begins really early on the ape-man's"biography"... as early as before his adoption by a female gorilla...
Disney's Tarzan clearly comes in the line of other Disney's superb works, such as Aladdin and Pocahontas, with "the same" beautiful animation, this time developed to a newer extent that does build the most lovely scenarios and characters - for example, the ocean's waves are nearly "like the real thing", yet keeping its touch with the animation world.
It seems that Tarzan is second only to Dracula in Hollywood's book adaptations - the dark side is winning, but that should be no novelty. There now are 48 Tarzan movies, but Disney's is the first in an animated form.
My 1st moments with Tarzan were a bit disappointing - I really dislike Phil Collins' voice, after some bad Genesis experiences, so I was surprised to hear the man screaming a song, from the very beginning... But - perhaps as a proof that I still am quite open minded :) - I gave him every chance and ended up enjoying the lyrics and even finding sweets on his "voice presentation"...
Disney's Tarzan starts mixing two tragic events: a human family escaping a ship wreck; and a gorilla's society losing a youngster to a tiger, or some other big wild cat, certainly extinct these days (now there are less than 1000 free asian tigers...).
This is a splendorous sequence that should grab you by the neck and drop you inside the jungle... where you'll meet VERY strong friends and VERY strong foes, in the sense that the personages are incredibly detailed, coherent (from a behavior POV), and perfectly vocalized (USA english version).
I also tried the movie with european portuguese voices, and it turned out to be MUCH better than I was expecting. It happens that I once watched both the european portuguese and the brazilian portuguese versions of Pocahontas, and... HORROR... they ABSOLUTELY killed the movie...
This time, there are severe surround-sound losses, and the european portuguese voices are the ones you're used to listen in every-day child software (boring edgy pitch), but they do deliver a very competent final effort and, surprisingly, IT WORKS! Captions don't match voices, though.
There are (at least) two non-human characters that you'll LOVE AND NEVER FORGET : Terk, a young female gorilla (voice by Rosie O'Donnell), and (my favorite) Tantor, the world's most adorable elephant.
Tarzan innovates: technically there are new techniques for realistic motion of 2D characters on 3D backgrounds, and the story doesn't recycle regular jokes: no sex, no farts, and no disrespectful hierarchies.
If you want to know the story, go buy Edgar's book. If you want a SUPERB movie, with many extras on its DVD edition (including tech stuff on the 2D / 3D mix), go BUY Tarzan and start supporting the so called "child movies"... which are becoming much better than many "adult" ones (and I am not talking about XXX)...
Terk speaks like Rosie O'Donnell does :), and it is easily one of those unforgettable personages. One could write she is "kind of punk" but Tarzan is really above such common stuff.
This hairy dude is Tarzan. He yells not a lot, and he has this healthy look because he is not one of those "machine parts" like you (and me)... he is out of "civilization"... he is not a robot... his rules are natural... you must envy him... just think about average Joe's life on the big city...