Why Was Disney's Tarzan a Failure?

It's not just the music. The main character also doesn't want anything.

So, in musicals, an “I Want” song is, naturally, when a character sings about what he or she wants. The Disney Renaissance period, or about ‘85 to ‘05 in terms of Disney animated films, was full of successful hits like Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Lion King, which all featured such songs. Tarzan, a disappointing, under-performing film from that time period, is also the movie credited with ending feature-length Disney animation, or at least halting it for a while, bringing a close to the Renaissance and moving into the era of Pixar and 3D computer animation. They still made some 2D traditional-style animated movies after Tarzan: Princess and the Frog tried to recreate the magic that previous successful and iconic movies had made before, and then there’s Home on the Range, the one where Roseanne plays a cow. So we got one decent, but not that ground-breaking, film following a formula that had become tired, and a movie that Disney probably wants us to forget it ever made.

Tarzan was essentially made with the intention of breaking the mold of previous Disney films, nixing the formula and not being a musical. At least, not a musical where the characters sing. They had Phil Collins sing in the background of almost every single scene, and the only good song in the movie is in the trailer. They probably wanted to do away with princesses and magical romance to make a story that would appeal more to boys. Which is not a bad thing by itself. But, in trying so hard to distance themselves from what they’d been doing before with formula-driven musicals, they ended up making a movie that was bland and uninteresting, even though the concept of it could have been very cool.

A story does not need an explicit “I Want” song, although these songs, like “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid tend to be iconic and long-remembered parts of the movies they’re in. But what an “I Want” song accomplishes still needs to be there in some other form. We need to see character motivation and the main character’s goals in life.

It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and actually seen the movie, but I can’t remember a single thing Tarzan wants. And it matters. See, the character is supposed to show us or tell us what he or she wants, and then we’re supposed to see events with a direct connection to that desire. Everything in Princess and the Frog affects the question of whether Tia will get her restaurant or not. That’s her desire, clearly established early on with the song “Almost There”, and referenced throughout the movie. Then, when she’s forced to decide between getting her restaurant but not doing the right thing and also not getting the guy, she chooses to sacrifice what she wants for love. And that is a powerful moment, because it has been so clearly established before how much the restaurant means to her. The earlier establishment of her character goals in the beginning are necessary to make that moment of personal sacrifice for the greater good emotional for the audience.

Even Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was not a big hit, understands this, by having the breathtaking song “Out There” set up the main tension of the story; Quasi wants to be outside and to be treated like a regular person, but Frollo, his caretaker and guardian, tells him that the outside world is full of wicked people who will abuse him for the way he looks. The truth is that Frollo is wrong about the outside world, and the end of the movie shows that it is possible for Quasi to be socially accepted.

Anyway, back to Tarzan. Child Tarzan seems to be upset that he’s human. He seems to want to be accepted as an ape, and a conflict is kind of set up where his needlessly mean gorilla dad makes the kid feel bad. The concept of “two worlds; one family” is established as the tag line that tells us the central theme of the movie.

But what happens later has nothing to do with Tarzan’s main established desire to be accepted among other animals. He already has an elephant friend and a gorilla friend, so even if his gorilla dad is mean to him, he doesn’t need his approval since he still has the support of gorilla mom and some other animals. Everything else is kind of “so what?”, like yeah, a leopard ate his human parents, but he doesn’t seem all that bent on revenge as a kid anyway. He’s just trying to fit in. Interestingly, it’s kind of like Lilo trying to fit in in the beginning of Lilo and Stitch. She’s a weird, outcast kid in the same way that Tarzan is a weird, outcast gorilla (except Tarzan is less of an outcast since he makes friends his own age pretty easily actually).

But the difference between the movies is about what happens after this is established. One could argue that meeting humans transfers his desire to belong among animals to shape a new desire to belong among humans. I think that’s what they were going for. But really, adult Tarzan’s life seems to have little to do with anything established about him as a child. If you’re going to spend a lot of the movie’s run time dedicated to a main character’s childhood, more than like a scene or two, you kind of need a reason all of that junk is connected to what happens when the main character is an adult. If you compare this to (not Disney) The Prince of Egypt, or Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, you’ll notice that the only events from the childhood of the main character shown are those necessary to help us understand what’s going on with these characters in the present. In Tarzan, we see long scenes of baby gorillas playing with a baby elephant, but none of it ends up mattering or meaning anything. It doesn’t establish any traits or desires we need to know Tarzan has moving forward.

So the story of Tarzan as an adult is about him meeting some humans, falling in love with Jane, learning human language and mannerisms, and heroically saving the humans from a mean guy so that he can become a hero and therefore gain social acceptance among humans. This is at odds with how much being accepted among animals used to be what mattered to him the most, creating this bittersweet ending where we feel like Tarzan has given up a pretty kickass life as a gorilla for an ordinary life as a human. But whatever, you do you, my son. He can be human if he wants to, it’s just that he never expressed any desire to be a human or to live among humans in childhood. So the child and adult parts of the movie just don’t feel like they go together.

So, as much fun as it is to rip on Phil Collins or talk about how abysmal the music in the film was, it actually has more problems than just a lackluster soundtrack where they were so afraid of sounding like a Disney musical but were unable to put something great in place of the Disney Renaissance musical formula. If you’re interested in hearing more about this movie and why it failed in terms of storytelling and music, check out this Youtube video. The film had a lot of creative concepts and some neat visuals going for it, but somehow they weren’t able to piece together their parts into a meaningful story. And maybe it could have saved it if they hadn’t been too proud to do an “I Want” song. Or at least found some other way of accomplishing the role of one in the story.