Commentary 05 Aug 2008 08:10 am
Tarzan
- On Sunday night, Telemundo ran Tarzan, and I watched about half of it. (I have the dvd but never think to pull it out.)
I remember taking my studio to the first screening of this in New York. A past editor of mine, Greg Perler, had edited it, and I was particularly interested in seeing his film and supporting the work. A number of things bothered me, and I suppose I didn’t give the movie as high a review as I would today. The event was colored by seeing Sting at the ticket booth as we were exiting. He turned and I nodded to him; he nodded back though he didn’t know me from adam. I remember well his beautiful camel hair coat. A brief memory.
Anyway, looking at the film again, many years later, I see that there’s some really fine animation in the beginning of the film, and I was almost in awe of the excellent assisting and cleanup on the film. The line work was quite fine. I very much like the animation of the cheetah/villain. It must have been pretty hard to do the character walking on the net as seen from a 3/4 overhead shot. Hard work to pull off.
The film has an interesting style. It uses quite daring closeups throughout, almost as if it were trying to get into the heads of the cartoon characters. This is quite effective at times. I suppose it was during one of these early closeups that I got in tune with the amazing linework around the apes’ noses.
Walt Disney once said that if a closeup were on the screen too long it would become obvious to the audience that it were no longer looking at Donald Duck but at a drawing. I always questioned that thought and wondered how long was too long on a good closup. This film seemed to try to challenge that idea and really, for the most part, pulled it off.
The length of the closeups also played nicely against the rollerblading through trees which, to me, moved too quickly. (I also thought it challenged the laws of probability. If the character were real, the skin of his soles would have been ripped off his feet immediately. It was just Glen Keane’s attempt to inject a popular fad into the film. But then we also have an elephant using his trunk like a periscope. He looks to see above water with his nose; a 
handy trick elephant’s can perform, I guess.)
The computerized backgrounds really was a break through. I found it hard, at times, to tell the difference between the painted BGs and the computer rendered ones and thought that some of the computer rendering quite graceful.
The film in Spanish was better off without Rosie O’Donnell’s voice but suffered a great loss without Minnie Driver’s. Her voice work has to be one of the great female voiceover performances post Beauty and the Beast feature length film.
- While watching this film – even in Spanish – it was obvious to me how much better the performances of the characters were in comparison to anything I’ve seen recently. I know there are a lot of fans out there supposting the new technology, but I still don’t see how the animation part will get any better. The technology will improve, and the realistic representation of the characters will improve, but I’m not sure animators will be able to find 
the soul of any of these characters and then be able to translate that through the medium to us.
The closeups in Tarzan were so well done that I was forced to think of Mark Mayerson‘s writing about animated acting. I have often compared animated characters to the performance you would get from a live actor. The slight change of the eyes, the actual thought process that is revealed through the camera. The slightest motions. Perhaps they were onto something with Tarzan. Of course, this family friendly film meant it had to have superfast gliding and swinging and fighting. However, it’s in the slow scenes that the film gets any magic that it has, and the animators have well earned it.
___But does it breathe?
Don’t miss Hans Perk‘s series this week on the multiplane camera.
on 05 Aug 2008 at 5:59 pm 1.Oswald said …
Interesting. Tarzan wouldn’t be a film I go back to in order to study character animation. I always liked Glen Keane’s rough pencil tests, but I haven’t seen the film since it was in theaters. I couldn’t stand the music, the rollerblading and the elephants, so I didn’t want to own it on DVD. But now, I guess, I will have to give it a second chance.
on 06 Aug 2008 at 3:14 am 2.Dutchduck said …
>I couldn’t stand the music, the rollerblading and the elephants, so I didn’t want to own it on DVD.
If you are interested in animation and Disney in particular, I don’t think those annoying things should keep you from seeing animated movies like this more than once by owning them on DVD.
I don’t like Home on the Range and Cars but still own them on DVD. It enables me to articulate what I don’t like about those movies and even more make me aware of what I like about others.
on 06 Aug 2008 at 4:54 am 3.Oswald said …
>It enables me to articulate what I don’t like about those movies and even more make me aware of what I like about others.
you are right of course. It’s just that I didn’t think that way in 1999/2000, when buying a dvd was quite an exception (at least, where I come from). Later on, I simply didn’t think of Tarzan, although I do have Home on the Range…
on 06 Aug 2008 at 7:18 am 4.Michael said …
The problem is that you buy a dvd, then six months later the Super Deluxe edition is released, then another six month and the Super Deluxe Platinum Better-Than-Ever version is out. I think I have three copies of Sleeping Beauty already without owning the newes Platinum Edition.
on 07 Aug 2008 at 2:28 pm 5.Jenny Lerew said …
Tarzan has superlative acting in it, alright. I think it’s an underrated film given the strengths of that acting and those performances(I completely concur about Jane, both in voice and animation). There was a lot of thought transposed into the characters’ minds and it shows in the choices, translates well.
You used an image of the main character from Ratatouille; did it lack for “thinking” characters? Subjectivity is all in this kind of discussion but I found it to be a perfect example of the same kind of acting, of “life” being evident, in a CG film.
There are (for me) dozens of scenes that come to mind where Remy communicates thought without just flailing about or doing stock-timing poses. What about the “fixing the soup” scene, where he gets more and more immersed in adding this and that to the pot? His turning away to escape(and save his life)but dragged back by the challenge–starting out frantically and then–with his back to the viewer, no less–gesturing with his finger(“Wait-wait-wait”) and wheeling on his heel –that he just knows there’s one more thing he needs to really get it right?
I could go on and on, but I got so many of those from that film…I myself would conclude that character animation is in good shape with guys(and girls)like that working in the medium, given good direction and good stories. I might be a pushover, but I don’t think so…I’ve always been pretty easily bored by animation acting if it covers the same old ground.