Disney's 'Tarzan' Was A Hit – So Why Is It Remembered As A Disappointment?

(Revisiting the Renaissance is a bi-weekly series in which Josh Spiegel looks back at the history and making of the 13 films of the Disney Renaissance, released between 1986 and 1999. In today's column, he discusses the 1999 film Tarzan.)A couple of weeks ago, Robert Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, made news (as the CEO of one of the most powerful companies in the world is wont to do) by implying that Disney and Apple could have merged had Steve Jobs lived longer. This tidbit is part of Iger's new book, The Ride of a Lifetime; the possibility of a merger between the entertainment company and the tech giant was mentioned in an excerpt published in Vanity Fair. Any Disney fan would do well to read at least this excerpt, if not the entire book, for a number of reasons. Specific to this series of essays, Iger's passion and belief in the power of animation as it relates to Disney is undeniable, though how he defines some of the late-90s and early-00s-era Disney films is fascinating, if somewhat baffling.To wit, Iger talks about what happened with Walt Disney Animation Studios after the sterling success of The Lion King. He acknowledges some expensive failures (though he includes Hercules and Fantasia 2000, neither of which — on their surface — seem like failures), and others that he defines as "modest successes", including a 1999 release that was the third-biggest Disney Renaissance hit at the box office, and is one of the biggest animated hits of the last 25 years. How is it, then, that the CEO of the Walt Disney Company would feel comfortable calling Tarzan, an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' iconic character, merely a modest success?

Lima and Buck had the headwind of approval not only from Disney but, in some small way, from Edgar Rice Burroughs himself. Burroughs had reportedly wanted an animated version of Tarzan of the Apes as far back as 1936. A descendant of Burroughs shared with the Walt Disney Company a letter the author had written, in which he had said, "The cartoon must be good. It must approximate Disney excellence." And yet, even though the character of Tarzan was an iconic figure in Western literature, having inspired a film series starring Johnny Weissmuller and parodies like George of the Jungle, there had never been an animated Tarzan until Disney finally came along.After the last few years of more mild successes (whatever Iger may dub them now), Disney was hoping to get back in the swing of things with Tarzan. Like the other recent titles, Tarzan was based on a very recognizable figure in literature. Also like many of the films of the Renaissance, it was driven by male characters. (From a financial standpoint, fair or not, the two biggest hits of the Renaissance period of the 1990s, The Lion King and Aladdin, were both male-driven stories.) Yet perhaps one of the biggest creative shifts represented in Tarzan would come from what was notably not seen onscreen: singing.There are, of course, songs in Tarzan, but they were deliberately designed to not be belted out by the characters a la the events of The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. The Disney Renaissance, in one way or another, is largely defined by its music, down to the last entry in the series (which we'll discuss in our final entry). But the choice to make the music in Tarzan descriptive in its storytelling about the hero, both as a baby and as he grows into a vine-swinging man, was driven by two things: the caution surrounding how earlier, musically driven Renaissance hits had dwindled into less massively lucrative hits, and by the film's incoming producer. 

It doesn't help that the songs in Tarzan lean too heavily on directly explaining what happens on screen. The first two acts of Tarzan are a fairly reasonable adaptation of Burroughs' novel Tarzan of the Apes. A baby is orphaned, after his parents' ship crashes on an island in the Congo and they're mauled to death by a bloodthirsty tiger. The human child is adopted by a loving gorilla mother (voiced here by Glenn Close), but kept at furry arm's length by its mate Kerchak (Lance Henriksen) because humans are typically unfriendly to gorillas. The boy, named Tarzan, grows up and eventually proves his worth to Kerchak, slaying the tiger that killed his parents. (It helps that Tarzan kills the tiger just as it's about to murder Kerchak.) Tarzan (voiced as an adult by Tony Goldwyn) eventually meets a few other humans, including the intelligent and winsome Jane (Minnie Driver), with whom he falls in love.Where the Disney story diverges is in the other human characters. Here, Jane is scientifically minded but strong-willed, whereas her father (Nigel Hawthorne, in his last voice role) is scientifically minded but also very goofy. The other major human character is William Clayton (Brian Blessed), a fierce type cut from the same jib as Governor Ratcliffe in Pocahontas and Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. While Jane and her father are fascinated by gorillas — their intent in making a trip to the same jungle where Tarzan lives is to study them — Clayton wants to kill them and reap the rewards of his bloodshed. Where Tarzan of the Apes culminates in the title character being brought back to the mainland of England, Disney's Tarzan stays in the jungle (coming only as close as putting on a suit and boarding a boat for England). And in the end, so too do Jane and her father stay in the Congo.And a handful of songs by Phil Collins are there to guide along the story, in a more painfully sweaty way than needed. Collins won the Oscar for Best Original Song with "You'll Be In My Heart", a lullaby of sorts that's first sung quietly and a bit sadly by Close. It's one of the only moments in the film where a character is depicted singing, and even then, Collins ends up singing the bulk of it over the soundtrack. Collins was, then and now, an extremely recognizable musician, having vaulted to stardom both through his solo career and as frontman of the British prog-rock band Genesis. Like Elton John, having Collins' presence on the music gave the film a boost of celebrity that wouldn't have existed with just Broadway-style songs.Though Collins' music is memorable enough, the lyrical work is often quite...let's call it lacking. One song, "Son of Man", features the headscratcher of a lyric: "In learning, you will teach, and in teaching, you will learn." The most recognizable song, "You'll Be In My Heart", features the line "I know we're different, but deep inside us, we're not that different at all." It's not as if every Disney song has truly memorable, brilliant and witty lyrics. But the songs in Tarzan require a lot of heavy lifting in the lyrics – they're often the aural backing for montages that showcase Tarzan's physical and emotional growth. Yet these songs are too often baffling, circular, and nonsensical. The music itself feels fitting to the jungle setting, with an emphasis (appropriately, given Collins' background as a drummer) on percussion. The lyrics are wildly out of place, though.

So Woody Allen ended up leaving Tarzan, and Disney inadvertently managed to avoid an embarrassing casting choice years down the road. Knight's a fine replacement, and is sufficiently nervous-sounding throughout. Yet among the cast members, there's just one standout: Minnie Driver as Jane. Previous versions of the Tarzan/Jane relationship could make the female character as laughable as Tarzan himself. This version, in no small part thanks to Driver's richly emotional and textured voice work, feels a lot more like her own person. The problems inherent in the film's version of the Tarzan/Jane romance have nothing to do with either Goldwyn or Driver — even as the stolid Tarzan, Goldwyn gets to have some fun with the not-oft-used character trait of the man-ape's intensely impressive gift of mimicry.The issue is one that hounds many of the Disney Renaissance films' romances: time. Tarzan, including its end credits, is just 89 minutes long, and is structured very much as the eponymous hero's coming of age. That means we don't meet the adult Tarzan until 20 or so minutes into the film, and Jane herself isn't introduced until the 30-minute mark. With such recognizable characters, most audience members are able to at least imagine a conclusion for the star-crossed lovers. But Tarzan and Jane meet fairly quickly, and are soon besotted with each other for reasons that are only truly encapsulated during a montage scored to another of the Phil Collins songs. Here could be another case of a Beauty and the Beast-style romance, with the male character all but acting like a beast and the female character a well-read young woman with a doting if dotty father. But the characterization is lacking.In part, that's because Tarzan, like the films released before it during the Renaissance, had the bad fortune to seem as if it was simply copying story beats from earlier Disney films. Tarzan's ascent to becoming the leader of the gorillas, a mantle he's bestowed after Kerchak dies near the end of the film, is reminiscent of Simba's ascent to the throne. And the initial conflict wherein Kerchak rightly presumes that other humans are dangerous and would rather destroy the jungle feels like an expansion of the conflict in The Jungle Book that leads Mowgli on a journey to the man-village. Tarzan and Jane have a bit of a Beauty and the Beast-style romance, compounded by Clayton feeling like a middle-aged version of Gaston.

And despite whatever Bob Iger has said now, Tarzan was a high point financially in the Renaissance as well. While Tarzan had a reported $130 million budget (because, as Iger no doubt knows better than this writer, computer-animation technology is expensive), it grossed over $170 million at the domestic box office. Adding in the film's worldwide take, it grossed nearly $450 million worldwide in 1999. Adjusted for inflation, Tarzan has made more than $300 million domestically, a number that's only been surpassed by just two films from the Walt Disney Animation Studios in the last two decades: Frozen and Zootopia. (Frozen, it should be noted, along with its upcoming sequel, is co-directed by Chris Buck, one of this film's two directors.)Critics were kinder to Tarzan than they'd been with other recent Renaissance pictures. Looking at it now, Tarzan is a mostly fine film with sterling animation and a story that doesn't feel terribly distinctive compared to its predecessors. And one of the recurrent issues of the latter half of the Renaissance rears its ugly head again: comic relief was both an expectation and a crutch of films that attempted to tell halfway serious stories which needed to be interrupted every so often by a wisecracking best friend or sidekick. Tarzan doesn't struggle as much as The Hunchback of Notre Dame did, but every time Terk or Tantor appears on screen, the story grinds to a halt in ways that feel utterly unnecessary.Yet Tarzan was a big hit for Disney. Some people will tell you that the Disney Renaissance ended with this vine-swinging hero (without really clarifying why, because it's not as if the filmmakers from the Renaissance stopped working at Disney after this film). But while it felt like another case of the studio successfully mining famous literature for one of their features, Tarzan was a rousing financial success without being a creative one. And, for all the film's intent to avoid showtunes, Tarzan's hit status was clear enough. In the mid-2000s, Disney's Tarzan became a Broadway show. 

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Next Time: We close out this series with a look back at the other Disney animated film released at the tail end of 1999, and the second sequel of the Renaissance: Fantasia 2000.