The film has a big advantage over its live-action cousins, being able to create incredibly dangerous situations on screen in which no real actors could survive. At the other, we have Hugh Hudson's Greystoke starring Christopher Lambert, which attempted to redress this portrayal of Tarzan as a simpleton, and interwove many characteristics of the Pocahontas myth.ĭisney's approach is closer to the former, in that it emphasises the incredible physicality of its main protagonist. At one end we have the Johnny Weissmuller films of the 1930s, which embraced the pulpy nature of the story and played up both the fan-service and the spirit of adventure.
There have been many different approaches to Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel throughout the history of cinema. The two sidekicks, one a wise-cracker, one a coward, are clearly trying to fill the roles of Lumiere and Cogsworth, but they are as unnecessary and incongruous as the talking gargoyles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. All the more marketable aspects of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin or The Lion King are here, but they don't so much serve the story as tick the boxes of audience expectations. Like its immediate predecessors, Tarzan finds Disney attempting to apply the tropes that underpinned the Renaissance to stories that simply don't suit them. Tarzan is not as disastrous as Atlantis in this regard, but it is another example of how the company's brand paranoia often comes at the expense of genuine creativity.
This in turn has pushed the company into more conservative and conflicted filmmaking, where the many entrenched Disney conventions often trample on the material. It is because Disney worked hard to tell these stories the right way, playing the likes of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to their own strengths.īut as the company has grown and diversified, having recognisable conventions (for the purposes of branding) has often been a higher priority. The fact that many of Disney's greatest works are based on fairy tales is not simply down to the inherent appeal or potential of these stories. Disney has always been at its best when it allows the material to shape its storytelling, rather than the other way around.
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