Search - Mark Mancina :: Tarzan / Read-Along

Tarzan may seem like the kind of story you'd sell to an entertainment-starved kid apt to leap around in a loincloth or swing from the chandelier, but Disney's retelling extends a vine to the tamest 5- to 10-year-old. Take away the ferocious leopard, an angry ape or two, and a bounty-hunting bad guy, and you're left with a love story: Tarzan (voiced by Tony Goldwyn), orphaned in the jungle, is adopted by apes Kerchak (Lance Henriksen) and Kala (Glenn Close). As he comes of age, simian siblings Terk (Rosie O'Donnell) and Tantor (Wayne Knight) school him in the ways of the savages, so that when Jane (Minnie Driver) arrives with her father (Nigel Hawthorne) and their jungle guide (Brian Blessed) on an expedition, she's bewildered by his beastliness. But she also finds him kind of cute. Cut to a couple of human, baboon, and gorilla chases, gunshots from a human who turns out to be more savage than the savages, and a storybook ending for the sweethearts, and this becomes rope-'em-in, sweep-'em-along, snip-off-the-loose-ends Disney escapism, the kind you can set your clock by. Or, in this case, your computer. Besides the booklet and tape combo, the tidily packaged Tarzan Read-Along houses a CD you can substitute for the cassette or slip into your CD-ROM drive. The story plays onscreen as the words scroll by beneath. The cast's talent, the animation, and the classic jungle-man yodel-yelp combine to pull young readers in by the pith helmet--in tackling Tarzan, Disney didn't monkey around. --Tammy La Gorce