Tarzan

Hello, my name is Bonnie Arnold

and I am the producer of Tarzan.

Hello, my name is Bonnie Arnold

and I am the producer of Tarzan.

Those guys are such liars.

I'm Bonnie Arnold, I'm the producer of Tarzan,

and welcome to the commentary on the DVD.

Kevin and Chris, say hello.

Hi, I'm Kevin Lima.

And I'm Chris Buck.

And we are the co-directors of Tarzan.

There you go.

And we're looking forward to sitting through the movie with you,

and giving you some insight into our process.

Yeah, we don't have to work now,

we just get to sit and watch it and talk.

This is the fun part. - (BUCK LAUGHS)

This opening sequence is really interesting to me

because it took so long to pull it together.

Well, I think story and (LAUGHS) visuals.

Right.

Trying to figure out what exactly to do here.

How to really introduce the movie? What background to tell?

Yeah, and there's so much from reading the book,

there's so much background that needs to be told

before you can go into the main body of the story

that we had to find a way to condense it into

this very, very compact amount of time.

To show how Tarzan actually got to Africa here.

I think we actually worked on this sequence

probably for the whole duration of production,

- about three years... Yeah.

...we worked on coming up with this opening.

And we tried many things trying to get to this point.

I think one version we had, we started with the gorillas,

- we started in the jungle itself. Right.

Another version...

And we never showed the humans.

We never showed Tarzan arriving in one version.

Right, the other one was to show how Tarzan's parents get Killed,

and we had a version in the, I think it's...

It's actually on the DVD here of... What was it?

- It was lightning. The leopard. Lightning, it was Sabor.

Sabor actually killing the parents.

Sabor killing... And during the lightning storm.

I think one time Michael Eisner saw

the story reel or a pitch of the opening sequence

and he brought up the idea

that actually went back to the original book, Tarzan of the Apes,

which we based this on,

of how Kala actually loses her baby and then

- finds Tarzan. Right.

I think we were a little skittish about it at first.

Can you put that sort of subject matter into a film,

a Disney film especially?

And I think we found out that we really needed that

in order to connect with Kala and her journey.

And it really helped that bond with her losing her child.

She immediately bonds with Tarzan.

I think, as an audience member,

- you accept that a little easier. Mmm-hmm.

You can't talk about the opening sequence

without talking about Two Worlds, the song.

And it was one of the first songs that Phil Collins wrote, really.

He... I think he wanted to do something with Disney animation for a long time.

He was a big fan of the animation,

and we thought he would be such a great addition to the film.

Really, first of all, because of his skill

as a percussionist and as a songwriter.

And only later did we realize that we really needed him as a singer, too.

Right. Well, we wanted something different.

We knew we wanted to stray away

from what people were perceiving as our formula,

the Disney formula.

We wanted to try songs a little bit different,

so using Phil enabled us to do that.

I remember Phil drumming out

the rhythms of this on the banister

- at feature animation. Yes. Right.

And I think it was the spring of 1996.

Right.

We had a little discussion about what the song should be

and how it should drive the film, and went out into the hall,

and he just started banging away on the banister.

Right. And that was when there were no lyrics to it, right?

Right. It was just, it was just the music.

And we thought we might not need lyrics.

Although, ultimately, we decided that we needed

- a song. Well, I think it was your idea,

wasn't it, Kevin? The Two Worlds idea, two worlds, one family.

Yeah, I can remember talking about that pretty early on,

making the film that that would be the theme of the opening of the film.

This was actually the first, if I remember correctly,

- the first sequence boarded... Right.

...on the movie.

And we actually boarded this before we had a script.

Brian Pimental was our head of story,

and we talked about the beats of the overall film

and he went away and did this beat of it.

Because we knew it wouldn't have dialog,

so we weren't relying on that to tell the story.

We knew it was going to be a totally pantomimed sequence.

Right. That was always a tough part, though,

this part of how much do we show with the parents.

That was always...

To make it clear to the audience that, yes, the parents were dead,

but, you know, we didn't want to be too graphic with it.

I think we had to, when we started previewing the film,

we realized that there were so many questions

about what happened to the parents

that we had to be a little bit more explicit about showing

- them actually in the corner. Right.

Because there were So many questions.

- "What happened to the parents?" Mmm-hmm.

I think this bonding that's coming up

here between Kala and Tarzan

was really, probably, one of the tent poles,

the emotional tent poles of the story for us.

Yeah. Again, this changed very little

from the very first time that we boarded it.

John Ripa, who did the animation

of baby and young Tarzan,

had just had a little baby.

And I think he did such a nice job of capturing the nuances of a little baby,

the movements and the cries and the sneezes.

Well, we were very fortunate, I think, with a lot of our animators

in that things happened in their lives that translated to the film.

Mmm-hmm.

There's an image coming up here that I can remember thinking of

when I first read the book,

and it's that hand-to-hand sort of image

of the baby's hand inside the gorilla's hand.

And it's an image that really defined a lot of the movie, for me, anyway.

It really made me want to make the film.

Well, it was the emotional side of it.

I know when you were talking to me about it, Kevin,

you asked me on the project,

and then, you know, it was Tarzan and that was interesting,

but there was the whole emotional side that I think had never been told,

that you were talking to me about

and it really, really made me want to do the movie.

And this sequence is one of those key sequences that...

Extremely emotional.

I think this is the piece of the Tarzan

that we never really see in any of the movies

- that we know so well. Right.

Oh, something bad is going to happen.

Have you seen this movie before?

Ah, Sabor.

Sabor, the villain of the first act.

Right, the animal villain.

I can remember talking about this in the very beginning,

how were we ever going to, you know, do this cat with all these spots,

and we went through a lot of different ways of doing it

and we even talked about him being a panther,

a black panther, at one point,

and stayed away from it because of the Jungle Book

- sort of connection. Right.

And, luckily, we found an animator

who was crazy enough to want to draw all those spots,

and actually demanded that he do it,

which was lucky for us.

Dominique Monfery, is that... Monfery, yes.

In our Paris studio.

What's also interesting about this whole opening of the movie

is that there's no dialog.

There's about... I think it's six or seven minutes with no dialog,

which I always found very interesting,

that you can connect to characters

and they don't have to say a word, really.

I think the recording session we had with Glenn Close,

she does the voice of Kala,

and I think she had a kind of a difficult time

trying to come up with some of the vocalizations for Kala.

Well, I think... In this sequence.

Well, think about it. You ask an actress of her caliber

to go into a booth and make monkey noises.

"Grunt like a gorilla, Glenn." - (BUCK LAUGHING)

So... We won't look.

I mean, ultimately, she came out with a lot of great stuff

that really, sort of, reinforces the emotional aspects

- of these scenes here. Right.

This is such a great moment, when she sort of triumphs over Sabor.

Trust your heart Let fate decide

I think kind of wraps up this whole opening

with Phil's song, here, the reprise of the song.

And here we are, we go into the depths of the jungle,

we're introduced to our family for the first time.

And this is really the first piece of dialog right here.

Mama, look! Look over there!

Our favorite, Rosie O'Donnell as Terk.

Yeah, Rosie, with her... She does even the baby voice.

She does the 5-year-old and she does the adult

and we decided to use her for the baby, too.

We just pitched it up a little bit.

We tried casting little kids that might sound like her,

but to no avail. (LAUGHS)

Well, it's hard to get that attitude

- out of a little kid. Exactly.

It's freaky-lookin', okay? That's what it is.