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.