Word: lions
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Movie cartoon characters don't have a glorious afterlife. Even The Lion King II went straight to video. STEVE JOBS, CEO of Pixar Animation, didn't want that to happen to his babies. "When we decided to do Toy Story 2, we wanted it to be as good as the best live-action sequels, as good as The Godfather II." This doesn't mean BUZZ LIGHTYEAR will swim with the rubber duckies, but WOODY does get abducted by an unsavory toy collector. When the movie hits theaters in November, new cast members JESSE THE COWGIRL, the PROSPECTOR and the evil...
...have one now. Tarzan, the new Disney animated feature, is the best news to hit cartooning, and perhaps Hollywood, in ages. It is the full-service, romance-and-adventure, laugh-and-cry movie that Disney and its new competitors have been trying to make, without quite succeeding, since The Lion King five summers...
...films, but with a fresh and affecting power. Now it is a safari into the interior of Tarzan's conflicted soul, where he searches not so much for his mate Jane as for his place in a society of men and apes. Though it would be nuts to predict Lion King-size revenues (that film and its ancillary markets made Disney $1 billion in profit), it is also hard to believe the mass audience will find Tarzan resistible. In its pace, wit and poignancy, this is the movie The Phantom Menace should have been...
Disney could use a hit; lately, the company has mostly been taking them. Profits are down, partly because of the slump in popularity of the post-Lion King animated features (and hence of the ancillary videos and merchandise). The company's stock is down too, losing 25% of its value in the past bull-market year. Costs have zoomed: a billion here for the Animal Kingdom theme park, $700 million there for a couple of cruise ships--eventually it adds up. And for months CEO Michael Eisner has been on the defensive in a suit brought by Jeffrey Katzenberg...
...mean to frighten the kids; Tarzan is not Oedipus Rex. It's a Disney coming-of-age comedy-drama in Lion King territory, with five radio-friendly tunes written and sung by Phil Collins. It has a standard villain: a grating white hunter (whose musculature nicely mimics Kerchak's, thus suggesting their similarity as imperfect male role models for the boy). It has a reeeeally cute baby baboon. It enfolds our hero in a dream jungle, painted in the lushest of sherbetty forest colors and shot in a new, virtual 3-D format called Deep Canvas that vivifies the scenes...