Tarzan II (2005)

Tarzan II arrives from 2005, a direct-to-video midquel from DisneyToon Studios with the animation outsourced to Toon City and a running time that respects nobody. It sits chronologically inside the first film, during the childhood years, which means we already know how everything turns out and are simply here to watch a small boy learn that he belongs. George Carlin voices a hermit gorilla named Zugor who impersonates a monster through hollow trees to protect his food stash. That is the plot. A boy runs away, meets a grumpy old ape, and comes home.

The film's moral is a soft one: be yourself, find your own tricks, accept the family that accepts you. It is delivered through pratfalls, a leopard chase, and Phil Collins on the soundtrack. Nothing in the enterprise is engineered to instruct the audience in contemporary social virtue. The self-acceptance on offer concerns species and belonging, not body image, and the film shows no interest in size or shape beyond the comic bulk of two bullying gorilla brothers. Kala is a patient adoptive mother, but the screenplay advances no argument about gender. There is no romantic content of any orientation, no racial commentary (Tarzan's difference is read as species, not skin), no environmental sermonizing about the jungle, and no economic critique, unless we count Mama Gunda ordering her sons to rebuild a treehouse as a parable about restitution. We do not.

The voice cast is white and the characters are apes, elephants, and one orphan. Tantor's germophobia is a gag, not a diagnosis. We are left with a modest, forgettable children's film that wants nothing from us but ninety minutes and a tolerance for hiccup jokes. On the ledger of cultural instruction, it registers as a blank page, and there is something almost restful in that.