A Disney production that promised much more than it delivered.
Like any child born in the last few decades, I lived with Disney movies as a child. However, for some reason I don't remember, I was never attracted to this movie and I ended up never seeing it until today. Having seen it, I am really unimpressed.
The biggest problem I felt in this film is the poverty and lack of inspiration of the script, which is a loose adaptation of the original story, written by Edgar Rice Burrough. The characters aren't the best designed, there are a lot of annoying characters around here (Jane's father, the gorillas, and particularly Terk and Tantor, a very unhappy side character duo) and even Tarzan is poorly designed and uninteresting. The prevailing feeling is that the writing team didn't know what to do with the task at hand and improvised something.
To make matters worse, there are a lot of logic problems in this movie. For example, there is no exact notion of time that passes, so we are left with the idea that Tarzan learned the first human words in an almost instantaneous way. Another thing that doesn't make a lot of sense is the way Tarzan himself doesn't recognize the physical differences between himself and the gorillas he lives with, as well as the immediate similarities between himself and Jane. At some point, he will have seen his own reflection, will he not? I don't mean to say that the film is bad… but the truth is that I feel that Disney has already given us much better and more interesting work.
Overall, I think the voice cast didn't do a bad job, with everyone involved doing their best and doing everything that was asked to the best of their ability. Personally, I didn't really like some of the options. Tony Goldwin, for example, voiced the film's central character in a relatively mediocre way, but his voice has nothing particular or charismatic about it (well, the character has been stripped of any charisma). For me, it was Glenn Close who stood out the most, but with very little to say, and Rosie O'Donnell is the one who pissed me off the most, with a very unpleasant voice.
The strong point of the film is the elaborate visuals and the animation, very well executed thanks to the high quality CGI. I'm not sure, but perhaps this was one of the first films by the studio to use computer animation on a more regular basis. What is certain is that the look of the film is exquisite, it is a little different when compared to the older films of the mid-decade. And if it is a fact that Disney films have, in general, a very particular attention to the soundtrack and the songs, this film maintains that characteristic, having hired Phil Collins to write and sing several songs. Unfortunately, and even though the film won the Oscar for Best Song for “You'll be in my Heart”, I didn't really like any of them and I find the film's sound particularly bad.