Trailer
Plot summary
Kala, a gorilla in equatorial Africa, loses her son to a leopard named Sabor. A shipwrecked British couple and their baby build a tree house nearby, and Sabor kills them, leaving the infant alone. Kala adopts the child and names him Tarzan. He grows up with the troop alongside Terk, Kala's niece, and Tantor, a paranoid elephant, while Kerchak, the silverback leader and Kala's mate, struggles to accept a human in his family. Explorers arrive to study the gorillas: the scientist Archimedes Q. Porter, his daughter Jane, and the hunter William Cecil Clayton. Jane strays from the group, and baboons chase her until Tarzan rescues her.
Cast
- Taylor Dempseyas Young Tantor (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Tarzan (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Disney's was the first animated Tarzan film ever made. Thomas Schumacher, then head of Walt Disney Feature Animation, said he was astonished nobody had tried it before, arguing the book cries out to be animated and that they were the first to present the character as Edgar Rice Burroughs intended.
- Supervising animator Glen Keane had Tarzan surf through the treetops after watching his son's interest in extreme sports. The directors feared a surfer dude, then liked his October 1996 test enough to use it in Son of Man, with moves modeled on skateboarder Tony Hawk, who landed the first 900 at X Games V in 1999 in front of an advert for the film.
- Keane assumed a character wearing only a loincloth would be easy, then realized Tarzan needed a working human musculature that could still move like an animal. The Paris team studied animals and consulted a professor of anatomy, making Tarzan the first Disney character to show muscles working accurately.
- To learn how gorillas are built, the animators sat through primate lectures, went to zoos and watched nature documentaries, and a group of them attended a gorilla dissection. In March 1996 the team spent two weeks on safari in Kenya and visited Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda to see mountain gorillas in the wild.
- For the sweeping backgrounds the team built Deep Canvas, a 3D painting and rendering system named by artist-engineer Eric Daniels that tracks brushstrokes in 3D space so computer backgrounds look hand-painted. It won its creators an Academy Technical Achievement Award in 2003 and later produced about 75 percent of the environments in Treasure Planet.
- Directors Kevin Lima and Chris Buck broke with Disney tradition and refused to let the characters sing. Lima said he could not see a half-naked man on a branch breaking into song, so Phil Collins performed the songs himself as a narrator.
- Mattel's Rad Repeatin' Tarzan action figure was pulled from the tie-in toy line after complaints about the way the toy moved its arms.
- Disney gave Tarzan a three-week digital projection run in July 1999 at three venues including the multiplex at Walt Disney World's Pleasure Island, making it the first major feature to be produced, mastered and projected digitally.
