Yes, Tarzan is, in many ways, a good note for this era to go out on. It's really pretty! There are some genuinely interesting characters! The action scenes are nicely done! The biggest problem with the film can be summed up quite simply: Phil Collins. The again, the biggest problem with most things Phil Collins is involved with can be summed up in the same way. A Disney film doesn't have to be a musical to succeed, but if it's going to lean heavily on its soundtrack - and they often do - then those songs should be, y'know, organic and entertaining at best, unobtrusive at worst. Phil Collins manages none of these things. (Of the many petty things Trey Parker and Matt Stone have pettily been pissed off about over the years, losing to Phil Collins might be one of the most reasonably petty of them all.)
Also not particularly helpful: Rosie O'Donnell. I legitimately wasn't sure throughout almost all of this whether Terk was a dude or a chick. Does that make me insensitive? Maybe. Maybe it does. But I don't particularly care. Pondering this was the main distraction I had from how much of an asshole the character comes across as, just based on the voice she gives her (that's right, right?) alone. Then again, it would hardly be a Disney Renaissance film without obnoxious and grating and thoroughly unwelcome comic relief, now would it? The frustrating thing in this case, though, is that there's non-obnoxious comic relief in this film, too. Jane is fun! Her fascination with the wild world of the jungle, to a borderline insane degree, is pretty funny - not in a loud-and-wacky-for-loud-and-wacky's-sake way, but in the way that actually derives from her characterization. What a concept! "He has no sense of personal space", she declares with abject glee, surely offending some feminists somewhere, but who cares, she's just so HAPPY!
The biggest surprise of the movie, though, was how genuinely likeable and even sympathetic Tarzan himself is. Now, granted, I've never read the book and I've never even seen any of the other adaptations of it, but I'd always gotten the impression from pop culture that he was, y'know, just kind of a simple-minded asshole. But, at the very least, Disney sidesteps that potential issue entirely. He's a complex fellow - certainly moreso than at least some of the human people raised by other human people in this story - driven, primarily, by his charming sense of curiosity. He's hardly the ape-man savage that lesser pop culture references like to think of the character as, such that the one time he actually breaks out the Stereotypical Tarzan Yell Thing, it comes across less as something that feels like a thing this particular character would do, and more like something they had to do, to remind you he's technically still Tarzan. He doesn't do much else that's stereotypically Tarzanesque, really. Oh, wait, I guess he beats a big jungle cat at hand-to-hand combat, too. That's something, right? I mean, I certainly couldn't do that. I can barely beat small housecats at hand-to-hand combat, on account of the blindingly painful sharpness of their hands! But I digress.
I admit: This movie made me cry, indirectly. There's something that Jesse identifies with pretty deeply in the scene where Li'l Tarzan stares into the water and violently mopes about how he doesn't look like everyone else so fuck the world. It's a cliché, but dammit, it's an identifiable cliché! That pretty much was my life in the past. It's only recently that I've learned to be okay with Real Jesse, and that's even still a work in progress. Yes, I even felt that way when I was Li'l Tarzan's age. I wish I'd just splashed myself with mud and organic matter during my not-even-close-to-mid-life crisis, instead of attempting radical weight loss self-surgery that, THANK GOD, didn't get very far....but, eh, what are you gonna do now. The point is, Tarzan's confusion over where he belongs is a genuinely effective plot device, and serves to make his foolhardy behaviour seem more justifiable, at least, than that of the average Disney Princess. And of course he's a Disney Princess! Look at that hair!
A cliché I'm less fond of here is the Terrible and Distant Father Who Finally Warms Up To His Son On His Deathbed, or TDFWFWUTHSOHN. Not only is it a cheap way to wring emotion, but there's something really cold about it from a storytelling standpoint, isn't there? It's as if to say the only way the story can end satisfyingly for our heroes is to senselessly bump this guy off, and he was an asshole and so everyone can go back to their lives almost immediately, without mourning, in spite of what he said. But then why make him try to go out in a "dignified" way, if everyone's gonna forget it anyway? Sometimes, people are just assholes. They're born assholes, and they'll die assholes. (Like Jim.) It makes especially little sense in this context. "Tarzan, I know you deliberately disobeyed me for, like, the millionth time, even though as we've just seen I was totally right, and that's why I'm lying here, dying of invisible blood loss from this invisible gunshot wound....so I think you're positively nifty now. Bye!" If you recall, Pocahontas was also pretty cold about this trope, with Pocahontas not batting an eye at the death of Cocoapuff, because she was never particularly cuckoo for him at all. (Something else this film has in common with that one: Two different languages that are both rendered as English, confusingly, except when those two different languages are being spoken in the same scene. It's a good thing that Tarzan, too, was pretty adept at Listening With His Heart.)
Though Tarzan is certainly no Beauty and the Beast or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and it's not even The Little Mermaid, it's still a surprisingly decent film, in spite of its many faults. Appropriately enough, it winds up being pretty emblematic of the Disney Renaissance experience as a whole, too. People seemingly like to remember that period being filled with great films like the ones I mentioned, but the reality is that Disney during this period was, on the whole, no more infallible than Disney during other periods - they just spent a shitload more cash in the hopes that people wouldn't realise that not every film was a slam dunk, or a home run, or a whatever-they-call-it-when-you-score-big-in-curling. Tarzan contains a few likeable characters and an effective emotional hook, like the best films of the period. But it also contains the obnoxious comic relief voiced by a divisive comedian, the almost callous lack of concern for the characters not involved in its romantic plotline, and the unmemorable non-Ashman-or-Menken musical numbers that became mockably common in Disney's oeuvre during that particular decade. Even during their most critically successful period, Disney still couldn't resist the same kind of pathetic pandering to dumb kids that they're reviled for engaging in today - the only thing that has changed is what dumb kids want in the first place.
TERRIBLE AND AWFUL AND WORTHLESS DIRECT-TO-VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL THAT DESERVES TO BE SHOT SO IT CAN FINALLY REALISE ITS TERRIBLE AWFUL WORTHLESS AND ATTEMPT TO ATONE FOR IT ON ITS DEATHBED: When Tarzan discovers that his many years of jungle livin' have blessed him with the ability to transmogrify into literally any jungle critter he could possibly desire, he does the only logical thing - he moves to America where he uses these skills to help the police solve crimes, in Tarzan III*: Tarzanimal!! His first case, though, is tougher than expected, though, as he squares off with a powerful Eastern European ambassador abusing his diplomatic immunity status to run a sinister art smuggling scheme, or something. It's always shit like ambassadors and art smuggling in shows like that, isn't it? Anyway, the ambassador's voiced by Coolio!
*or would it be Tarzan IV? Does Tarzan & Jane count for the sake of numbered sequelry?
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