[Movie Monday] Tarzan

Movie: Tarzan

Genre: Animation

A new week, and a new Monday!

With the new Monday comes the new Movie Monday!

“Come stop your crying/It will be alright/Just take my hand/Hold it tight./I will protect you/From all around you/I will be here/Don’t you cry./For one so small,/You seem so strong/My arms will hold you, Keep you safe and warm/This bond between us/Can’t be broken/I will be here/Don’t you cry.”

Have you ever heard about those experiments done on animals where human babies are placed in a cage with them? And how those parent animals start looking after the human babies like the child is one of their own cubs?

Well, when it comes to Tarzan, it’s exactly like that. Well, at least minus the entire “experiment in a cage with wild animals” part, that is. In the movie, the story starts off with two families – A human family of three (a mother, a father, and a baby boy), and a herd of gorillas, which one small group consists of the father who happens to be the leader of the large group, a mother, and a baby. As it would turn out, the human family ends up getting stranded on the very island where the gorillas happen to be residing upon one stormy night, and they manage to make a house out of the resources that they can find in the forest up in a tree. As we get to see how the two families live their own lives in the first few minutes that the You’ll Be In My Heart song plays, we get to see how peaceful the two families live.

However, tragedy befalls them both as the gorillas end up losing their child to a jaguar, and the human family ends up having both of the parents to die by the attack of the very same animal with the baby left as the sole survivor among the three humans. Of course, not too long after, Kala, the mother gorilla, is seen wandering through the forest as she mourns over her lost son until she hears a cry of an infant somewhere up in the trees. When she follows the sound, she soon finds herself another chance at being a mother. However, it’s not long before she finds herself being up against the jaguar that killed her child and the parents of the toddler she finds herself holding in her arms. She ends up having to run for her life and barely manages to escape, only to end up fighting with her husband, Kerchak, on matter of whether to keep the human baby or not. When Kerchak refuses to accept the human from believing the baby will only bring danger in the end to the gorilla pack while telling Kala to keep the baby if she wants as long as she doesn’t have him take a part in raising the baby.

The story goes on to show how the baby turns out once Kala names him Tarzan, and Tarzan comes to believe that he is a gorilla, just like rest of the pack. However, one day comes a woman named Jane with her father and another man, Clayton, and sets up a camp while the trio goes on a small expedition to find the gorillas and habitat grounds. Few of the gorillas that Tarzan has grown up with and become close friends with, along with an elephant named Terk, comes to find the camp, and begin to look around. It’s from bumping into things and breaking things by accident that they begin to make music of their own. All this happens while Jane is being chased by an angry mob of apes, and Tarzan rescues her, which then he slowly comes to a realization that there’s a whole world out there that he never knew of, which eventually leads to him realizing that he’s actually not like the other gorillas. In fact, not at all. Instead, he slowly comes to an understanding that he’s actually a human just like Jane.

Through the epiphany he gains, he must come to a decision whether to leave his family of gorillas or leave with Jane to civilization of humans where he should have grown up in rather than in the wild. With never even having had Kerchak’s approval and never having been seen as Kerchak’s son, the decision may come easy, but can he leave behind the one female gorilla, Kala, that looked after him and raised him as her own? And can he actually leave his friends, such as Terk, behind? Or is it just an easy choice to make to leave with Jane back to England to learn to be a proper gentleman?