I feel like I’ve written about this movie too many times before on my site(s), either babbling or straight reviewing or mentioning or whatever, but what can I say, over five years after its release it’s still an all-time favourite of mine that will never go away, and I haven’t yet reviewed it after how many hundreds of reviews on Textpattern, so it’s about damn time. This viewing was special, I watched it simultaneously with Sarah.

The eyes get me in this movie. Every single character has the most beautiful eyes. Here they take part in a match-cut; there, a dissolve to the sun and the moon; even Sabor the tiger’s eyes are perfectly drawn. They’re always so focused, intense, concerned, mischievous, in love. I love when Jane draws Tarzan on the blackboard and gets to the eyes and slows down, drawn into her own black and white reproduction of the guy she’s falling for, ”... I’ve never seen such eyes…”

The music gets me in this movie. Primal drumbeats, dramatic strings, Phil Collins and Marc Mancina make a perfect team. Even the manic “Trashin’ the Camp” is enjoyable, letting the animators let loose with a truly old-fashioned Disney scene.

Tarzan is just full of tiny moments that make me gasp, make me cry, make me laugh hysterically in a way that few things can get me to do. The humour, I guess, is just precisely in line with my own sense of humour, and where others might titter or smirk a little, I die in this movie; the baboon chase, Jane’s reaction to Tarzan bearing over her carrying her on the vine, her telling the story of this encounter to her father and Clayton (“And daddy, they Took My Boot!”), Tarzan mimicking Clayton (“No! nononono!”), tiny little aside lines (“And he walked, on his hands – like this!” “Oh, I see now! Like Aunt Isabelle!”)

I love how the scenes flow into one another – how, for example, just as Tarzan is finally reaching a form of bond with Kerchak, you see a glimmer of love in Kerchak’s eyes (those eyes again), and a gunshot cracks that storyline open, says, “Sorry, there’s a girl and a bad guy coming, you’re gonna have to pick this up later.” And immediately following that bombshell, comes the humour again, Tantor denying that the gunshot may, in fact, have been his backside.

I could just go on about this movie for ever… the way Kala breaks down when she knows Tarzan is going to leave her – not by looking at him, but by the sound of the shoes he’s wearing, clip-clopping towards her from inside the treehouse. It’s so crushing, so simple. The hands motif, distancing Tarzan from Kala, connecting him to Jane. This is before I even get into the breathtaking animation, the deep canvas technology making the vine-surfing completely mesmerising, the colour palette, etc. I’m just totally, deeply, madly in love with this movie.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005 at 2:15 am in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.