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Anima/ted/diversions

Tarzan** and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut*** [See note below]

Adrenaline comes to Disneyland. It is an unusual summer when two box office hits are animated features. True, one of them, South Park, only came out last week but it seemed destined to make the top ten list, while Tarzan has already been there since its release a few weeks back. With Warner Bros.' Iron Giant scheduled for release shortly, this may be a highly animated season. However, Tarzan and South Park have little in common other than animation. When a stereotypic homosexual named Gay Al sings a song called "I'm Feeling Super"--as part of a stage show to accompany the planned execution of Philip and Terrence, the two R-rated stars from Canada whose movie Flaming Asses precipitates a war between their homeland and the United States--it might as well be an intentional burlesque of one of the drearily inspirational songs by Phil Collins that litter the soundtrack of Tarzan. Very much in the mold of Disney animated features of recent years like The Lion King (1994) or Beauty and the Beast (1991), Tarzan is an advertisement for good will and positive thinking decked out with the formidable technical resources at the disposal of Disney's artists. Unlike the wretched Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), which altered the bleak ending of Hugo's novel in order to tack on a plea for the handicapped, Tarzan stays closer to its source, although it plays some angles that the survivalist-minded Edgar Rice Burroughs could hardly have foreseen, turning the story of a foundling into a disquisition on inter-species tolerance when the human has to prove himself to the apes who reluctantly adopt him as well as making the villainous white hunter Clayton, who rampages through the jungle searching for gorillas to capture, into an ecological bogeyman. If the original novel was an adventure story larded with large helpings of Social Darwinism, this is a politically correct allegory about life in the wild.

In comparison to the most famous of the older movie versions, the 1932 MGM production directed by W.S. Van Dyke, this is in every respect a laundered Tarzan--so much so that I hope to post an article on the differences between the old and new Tarzans in the near future. Nevertheless, no one except Richard Schickel is likely to gainsay the movie's strengths as a piece of animation, although the sumptuous landscapes tend to resemble kitschy imitations of nineteenth century realistic painting. But when there is something moving on the screen, it is a different story. In fact, the most interesting thing about Tarzan is its fast pacing, as if the folks at Disney had been studying the movies of Tony Scott or Jan De Bont. When the apes invade Clayton's camp, tear everything apart, and proceed to improvise a dance routine, it is easy to forgive the movie's shortcomings. Elsewhere, Tarzan even manages to stray from the suffocatingly literal standard Disney format by introducing some Victorian engravings in a way that recalls their use in Karel Zeman's Invention of Destruction (1958). And in one genuinely brilliant moment, Tarzan watches a running figure in a praxinoscope, as the moving image dissolves into one of him running through the jungle. Nor do the animators overlook the potential of color, especially at the film's climax, when the hunters stage a raid on the gorilla encampment and the light cast by their torches momentarily turns the entire screen blood red, which then gives way to the subdued blues, greens, and gun-metal greys of the jungle. The discrepancy between these touches and the rest of the picture makes Tarzan, like so many other Disney animated features, a wildly uneven viewing experience--so much talent expended for the sake of such a silly subject, and no "Silly Symphony" to be sure.

Of course, someone might object that this is what Disney had always done since the days of Snow White (1937). But what might be called the "classic" Disney features--Snow White, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), and Bambi (1942)--belong in a totally different category. What is the message of Snow White except that happiness is not to be found in this world, only in the secularized version of the hereafter to which the Prince takes Snow White at the movie's conclusion? All of these productions project a grimly survivalist vision of life as an ongoing struggle between predators and their prey--although none of them quite so explicitly as Bambi--a vision that is ideologically more akin to the survivalism of Edgar Rice Burroughs than anything in Tarzan. Behind these pictures lurk the shadows of the Great Depression and the imminent political catastrophe in Europe; their seeming high spirits are no more than whistling in the dark, an apotropaic attempt to stave off the encroaching darkness. I no longer recall my reaction to the death of Bambi's mother when I saw that movie at about age six; a couple of years later when I saw Snow White I was more affected by the flight through the forest than I was by the happy ending--after all, I had read the story and I knew it ended happily. Today, I find these scenes almost unbearable to watch. When the animals sing to Snow White after she has narrowly escaped death and fled through a haunted woods in a sequence that still puts most horror films to shame, the scene has a pathos that digs into the deepest levels of the collective experience of the 1930's in a way few motion pictures ever succeeded in doing. But Tarzan's hypertrophied bursts of lyricism--by now a stylistic convention at the studio--are not only more plangent than in anything in the older Disney movies, they have nothing comparable to the gloomy context of the years immediately preceding World War II to give relief to them. Tarzan tries to milk a few tears out of the deaths of Tarzan's parents, and it does so more effectively with the death of his ape father, but these disagreeable events seem only minor wrinkles in the best of all possible worlds.

The Three A's. Anally oriented humor commences early on in Tarzan--when his ape mother-to-be pulls open his diaper and sniffs at his butt--and continues on through the movie like a trail of monkey droppings through the jungle. When one of Tarzan's animal friends accuses another of being "emotionally constipated," the line seems a little strange in a children's picture, but it is hardly out of key with the rest of Tarzan. Even without these obvious hints, the anal theme would still be tacitly hovering nearby, in the on-all-four's posture of the apes, a posture also assumed by Tarzan before his introduction to civilization. (One advertisement for the movie shows the hero on all fours atop huge letters spelling out TARZAN.)

Although I do have the impression that when a pack of baboons comes to the aid of Tarzan and Jane at night I saw some purple asses briefly flitting across the screen, otherwise nothing in the movie draws undue attention to what children automatically notice the first time they visit the monkey cage--the animals' protuberant posteriors. Nevertheless, precisely because Tarzan spends some time detailing the hero's slow process of simianization, the point sticks out in a way it hardly did in the older versions. In fact, since this is an animated film it can get away with what no live action movie would have dared to try: putting Tarzan in a position that suggests sodomization. While details like these can rightly be dismissed as trivial, they point to an underlying theme Tarzan more or less sweeps under the carpet: the tragic, irreparable breach between nature and civilization, a breach evident in the change from the vertical posture of the higher primates to the horizontal one of the human species.

Note: When I posted this review last summer (1999), I had intended to complete it with some remarks on the aesthetics of animation and  the conclusion of my review of  South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. But at that point I lay down my cyber pen and did not pick it up again until the beginning of this year, at which point there were more pressing things to attend to.  Since I have a longstanding passion for animated films, I hope to return to that subject again in more detail in the future. But in the meantime, I feel I undervalued South Park because of its rather inept use of animation and I have boosted its original rating from one star to three. As far as the concept goes, the film is quite imaginative, but South Park only comes to life visually when it literally goes to Hell--in the episodes involving Satan and Sadam Hussein.