TARZAN

Lord of the Apes, King of Cartoons

Last year's Tarzan and the Lost City showed us a reasonably faithful view of the Tarzan in Edgar Rice Burroughs' later Tarzan novels - the quick-paced, pulpy, potboiler adventures. Predictably, the Disney animated version concentrates on Tarzan's early life growing up among animal friends. Unpredictably, it does not feature the death of Tarzan's foster mother Kala, which was an important turning point in the novel and Disney animated features have been making use of death-of-mother scenarios since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

However, there's plenty of death to make up for it. After a spectacular opening detailing how Lord and Lady Greystoke ended up marooned on the Ivory Coast of Africa, Kala's real baby is killed by a leopard and it's quickly established that Tarzan's parents were killed by a big cat as well.

After being adopted by the ape clan, it takes only one generic Phil Collins song (which sounds the same as every other Collins song in the movie) for young Tarzan (Friday the 13th series vet Tony Goldwin) to grow to manhood. The film does a very good job showing the young Tarzan's talent for mimicry and languages, the conflict of his heritage, and his physical speed and power. It strays greatly from the source when depicting his meeting with Jane Porter and his first adventure with people of his own species.

Jane (Minnie Driver) is portrayed as a silly British airhead with an overbite. She and her father (Nigel Hawthorne) are being guided on an expedition to study gorillas by the villainous Clayton (Brian Blessed), who secretly plans to capture the apes. This gives the film a cloying conservationalist air that is a bit at odds with Burrough's savage world. Lance Henriksen lends his wonderful voice to the great ape Kerchak. Wayne Knight voices the role of a big dumb elephant, and Rosie O'Donnell is a loud-mouthed ape.

Though heavily revised, I can live with this version of Tarzan, since it's meant as a story-book version for children. The artwork is breathtaking, making full advatage of digital tech to lend realistic textures and movement to backgrounds and creating a look that is close to 3-D.

Lord of the apes; talking animals; vine fu; p-star Henriksen.

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