Tarzan & Jane (2002)

Starring (the voices of) Michael T. Weiss, Olivia d'Abo, Jeff Bennett.
Directed by Steve Loter.
Written by Bill Motz and Bob Ruth.
Direct-to-video release by Walt Disney Home Video.
75 minutes.

LVJeff's Rating: 2/10

Cut-and-Paste Your Own Sequel

You know it's a sad day when you can say with some measure of credibility, "Lion King II! Now there was a Disney sequel!" These straight-to-video sequels are all a bad idea, but lately Disney has shown us just how low they could go with Cinderella II and, now, Tarzan & Jane. The memory of the Cinderella sequel as a cheap and obvious attempt at money-making by repackaging three bad tv-show episodes as a movie had just barely faded from my mind when this latest incarnation of that idea hit the store shelves.

Yes, Tarzan & Jane is three 21-minute cartoons held together by a weak outer narrative. The only difference this time is that the television show they came from, The Legend of Tarzan, has already been on the air. Still, that doesn't excuse Disney from not mentioning the show in any of its ads for Tarzan & Jane. After all, just stating that the movie is spun-off in some way from their original 1999 movie should be good enough for parents to purchase a copy to baby-sit their kids.

As one would expect, the episodes are standard-issue kid-cartoon adventure plots. The animation is television quality, which in itself is lamentable -- it serves to tarnish through association the beautiful work done on the theatrical film. Overall, the episodes per se aren't terrible -- they're certainly better than the awful sludge presented in Cinderella II and contain some decent action in them.

But still I protest. There is no reason for Tarzan & Jane to exist other than to make cash from lazy parents. Yes, all the sequels are guilty of this, but at least some of them displayed a little creative effort -- the aforementioned Lion King II, Pocahontas II, and perhaps even the recent Return to Neverland, which was apparently strong enough to warrant a theatrical run. Tarzan & Jane, though, was created with the effort it would take to cut three pages out of a magazine and stapling them together to form your own magazine. It's quite simply unacceptable.

©Jeffrey Chen, Sep. 7, 2002

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