Parody him, venerate him, slap a tuxedo on him, it doesn't matter: to paraphrase Led Zeppelin, Tarzan remains the same streamlined tribute to noble savagery. If only because money-grubbing producers kept on leasing out their entitlements to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan characters, the orphan who was raised by apes has been brought to the screen in more permutations than any other literary hero. Now that Disney has appropriated the vine-swinger for use in its annual summer cartoon, I'm not sure I can even type "Tarzan" without adding a registered-trademark symbol beside it. And just because they've animated him doesn't mean they've liberated him: Disney's swift, agile Tarzan (voice of Tony Goldwyn) is, personality-wise, as yawn-inducing as most of his live-action brethren. The movie itself is an uneasy hybrid of conflicting formulas.

Tarzan commences with a rousing sequence depicting the parallel lives of Tarzan's parents and parents-to-be. Shipwrecked, Tarzan's human mother and father build a treehouse and successfully tend to their baby until disaster strikes in the form of a hungry leopard. Kala (Glenn Close, who dubbed Andie MacDowell in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes), a mother gorilla whose new child was similarly devoured, discovers Tarzan squirming in his cradle and adopts him instantly, though husband Kerchak (Lance Henriksen) refuses to regard the boy as a son based solely on his human countenance. The years pass, and Tarzan, who's learned to negotiate the forest like his ape protectors, encounters an expedition that includes proper English maiden Jane Porter (Minnie Driver), her father (Nigel Hawthorne), and a big game hunter named Clayton (Brian Blessed). Because they look more like him than anything or anyone else in the jungle, Tarzan suffers a crisis of identity--and gets a chubby for Jane.

The exaggeration of animation creates new gaps in the already-tenuous Tarzan logic. First, let me establish that Tarzan and his ape friends speak English for our sake, but it's understood that they're babbling variations of "Oo-oo-ee-ee-ah-ah" to one another. So why is Tarzan able to introduce himself to Jane as "Tarzan"? Then there's the issue of Clayton. Everybody's inexplicably surprised when he betrays his escorts and sets traps for the gorillas. If the Snidely Whiplash moustache and double-barrelled shotgun were not clues enough, surely the fact that he's incessently asked Tarzan, "Where are the gorillas?" was a bold sign of an ulterior motives for his trip to Africa?

The film rehashes the The Lion King's irritating time-compression technique: Tarzan's formative years are skipped entirely with a lap dissolve of preteen Tarzan to adult Tarzan--the film thus misses its only opportunity to be innovative by dismissing his maturation. What would adolescence be like for Tarzan? If one were raised by apes, would(n't) one develop a sexual attraction to them at some point? The film hints at a burgeoning romance between Tarzan and Turk, a girlla, that is interrupted by the arrival of Jane, but if Turk has more than platonic feelings, they remain as subtext.

Such depth, not to mention a beastiality subplot, would stick out like a sore thumb in a neo-Disney film, I guess. After said opening, Tarzan goes bland. (This includes Phil Collins' song score, elevator music for the wild.) It answers questions of racism and gun control with a big smiley face. It preaches against poaching in Hardy Boys terms that would never have children suspecting that such ugliness goes down in the real world. It provides unnecessary, obnoxious sidekicks for our hero in the form of the aforementioned Turk (Rosie O'Donnell, in a grating vocal performance) and an aw-shucks elephant named Tantor (Wayne Knight). Its climax offers not a single moment of surprise.

None of this quite meshes with the conventions of Burroughs' Tarzan tales--I can't quite determine which recipe has been shoehorned into which. Does it occur to the child weaned on the new Disney movies that they're watching the same story over and over again? Pocahontas, Mulan, and Tarzan each fit into the same rigid paradigm, yet they're respectively based on an American legend, Chinese folklore, and a beloved modern mythology. One aspect of this Tarzan does enthrall: its resplendent design, of course, a seamless blend of digital and traditional animation techniques. The two are most complementary during "Deep Canvas" action scenes that will undoubtedly be diminished on the small screen. (They are perhaps reason enough to see Tarzan at the cinema.) Tarzan soars through the trees like a surfer coasting on imaginary waves (indeed, his liquid movements were modeled after an animator's skateboarding kid). If only he defied our expectations as well as gravity.-Bill Chambers