I got Netflix to send me this 2013 German animated version of Tarzan. Good thing, it's pretty poor. It's all the fault of Reinhard Klooss, he's the producer and director, and he co-wrote the script with Jessica Postigo and Yoni Brenner.
They've changed Tarzan's origin story, it's set in modern day, and the Greystoke's are in Africa when their helicopter crashes. The son is the only survivor and he's raised by Kala, an ape. The African jungle teams with the regular sorts of jungle critters but we've also got some dinosaur like birds and a giant worm like thing that can swallow people whole. There's some violence but hardly anyone dies, on screen at least. The baddies might have had a bad end but we'll never know, the movie cuts away as their helicopter disappears into the mist. Did it crash? It's near the end of the movie and at that point why would I even care.
I didn't care much for the character design and Tarzan's yell is embarrassingly sad. Some of the backgrounds look better than others, but at times it's like watching action figures on a plastic playset. If a giant hand came in from stage left to move the characters around, I wouldn't be surprised. After a while I had the thing playing at 2 times speed just to get to the end. The music sucked too. I briefly looked at the extras but it was mostly featurettes on the motion capture for the animation. I'm bored with that sort of thing. Not much reason to add this to my Tarzan collection. I'll stick with the live action films of the past. They don't deliver the Tarzan of the books but I have grown fond of those films.
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