June 17–24, 1999

movie shorts

Tarzan

Given the ear-splitting volume at which summer blockbusters are now projected, it behooves me to issue a special warning: Tarzan contains songs by Phil Collins. Several songs by Phil Collins. And they are very, very bad. Disney’s annual animations seem to follow a fairly regular one-on/one-off pattern, and since last year’s entry was the superlative Mulan, you know what that means for Tarzan. Supposedly a return to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original vision (whatever that means: the guy’s not exactly Faulkner), Tarzan does feature some well-done shots of the titular man-ape swinging on vines and surfing down moss-covered tree limbs, but the story’s still tricked out with the by-now tiresome Disney devices, the irritatingly upbeat sidekicks (one voiced by the skin-rash-like Rosie O’Donnell), the comically doddering old man, the thick-eyebrowed villain. Rather than tackle the fairly interesting subject of what animals might say if they could talk, the film merely gives them the voices and attitudes of humans, which is about as funny as the standard sitcom device of the little child with the grown-up mouth.

—Sam Adams