Tarzan & Jane (2002)

Tarzan & Jane is a 2002 direct-to-video artifact from Disney Television Animation, assembled from three unaired episodes of The Legend of Tarzan and bound together by a wedding-anniversary frame story. Jane, nearing her first anniversary with Tarzan, searches for a suitable gift while Tantor and Terk offer reminiscences in place of suggestions. The result is less a narrative than a scrapbook, and the seams are visible throughout. Three discrete adventures unspool, each with its own antagonist and its own tidy conclusion, linked by the thinnest thread of romantic worry.

The first episode brings three of Jane's English friends to the jungle on a misguided rescue, where panthers chase them deep into the trees. Jane teaches them survival techniques, and she is permitted a measure of competence. The surrounding plot still concerns itself with whether her husband feels admired, which keeps the enterprise inside conventional anniversary-romance territory. The second episode follows two prospectors who betray Tarzan over a volcano's diamond deposits. They behave as stock greedy villains behave, hoarding treasure until the mountain erupts and the treasure is lost. Two bad men get arrested. No argument about extraction or wealth is made, and none appears intended.

The third episode involves a suitor of Jane's who proves to be a German double agent during the First World War, a mess resolved by a pilot and a commandeered plane. Tonally the film is froth. It lectures nobody, moralizes about nothing, and asks its young audience only to keep watching. The voice cast is drawn almost entirely from the television series, the colonial English characters pass without comment, and the volcanic spectacle exists to move the plot along. The film displays almost none of the social consciousness that later children's animation would treat as mandatory, and it shows no interest in acquiring any. A relic, mildly charming, largely disposable, entirely at peace with itself.