Tarzan (1999)

  I remember seeing this in theaters as a teenager and not being impressed at all, a rarity for me having grown up on all things Disney animation.  I know it was a big deal with Disney debuting some new CG background style but I hated the story and found the Phil Collins soundtrack a total misfire.

It's been damn near 20 full years since then so I thought I'd give Tarzan another shot to see if I had grossly misjudged this animated take on Edgar Rice Burroughs' timeless tale. 

Nope.  It's still awful.

Kala (Glenn Close) the gorilla loses her infant to a leopard and adopts an orphaned human over the objections of her mate, Kerchek (Lance Henriksen).  The child grows up to be a strange, quasi-accepted member of the troop, content with his place until he stumbles across a pair of explorers.  Professor Porter (Nigel Hawthorne) and his daughter Jane (Minnie Driver) have come to study gorillas in their natural habitat but are unprepared to meet what they believe is the missing link.  Their "guide" Clayton (Brian Blessed) is more interested in hauling the apes back for a profit than conservation and believes the naïve Tarzan (Tony Goldwyn) is his ticket to finding them.

Animated movies live or die on the strength of the side characters and this film falls flat in that regard.  Terk (Rosie O'Donnell) and Tantor (Wayne Knight) seem like watered down rejects from The Jungle Book and the aforementioned Phil Collins score is bland and uninteresting, not offering even a single song for the characters to show any personality.  ("Trashin' the Camp" is fucking noise, not a song.  Don't @ me.)

There could have been more drama mined from Tarzan's fish-out-of-water confrontation with his foster family but the film opts for a lazy kidnap and rescue instead.  Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen a good Tarzan adaptation so maybe I'm just being super harsh.