Disappointing film, TERRIBLE Tarzan design; Filmation series was better
Surprisingly poor film, given when it was made -- not so many years after Disney was making its classics.
Something just happened after Pocahontas. Disney became incapable of making great movies, and the studio went on a downward spiral that didn't change until Tangled.
The animation of the backgrounds in Tarzan is very good -- not Lion King good, but good -- but the design of the characters is terribly crude.
Tarzan himself looks ridiculous. What was his hair supposed to be -- dreads? Is that supposed to indicate that he's a mulatto? His family was British, for pete's sake.
And Tarzan's facial shape, good god -- his chin was as cartoonishly pointed as the Joker in the old Batman comic books, or the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz.
Jane wasn't attractive (not ugly, but very much a Plain Jane), and the bad guy was a two-dimensional and ultimately predictable goon.
The animal-stomping musical number was excruciatingly awful and painfully unfunny. In fact, for a film set in the jungle, the animals were really boring. (Compare Lion King, where they were all entertaining.)
Worst of all, the business of Tarzan crouching like an ape was painful to watch. It really says something about the diminishment of our culture that in the past, Tarzan stood like a man, a hero, but in this modern film, he crouched like a monkey. It indicates how much man himself has diminished.
Not kidding, I prefer the old Filmation TV series when it comes to animated Tarzan. By far.