Disney’s annual summer animation extravaganza begins promisingly – there’s no annoying Mickey Mouse cartoon and about ten minutes of fantastic-looking action with no dialogue or song. But it can’t keep up the pace and it fails to generate the laughs that adults have enjoyed in Disney’s past two summer hits, Mulan and Hercules.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s certainly not a bad film. Disney and screenwriter Tab Murphy (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) do an admirable job of adapting the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. The script pulls no punches and might actually be a bit jarring and melancholy for the youngsters. And old-timers beware - this ain’t your father’s Tarzan. The loin-clothed wonder not only swings from vines, but also surfs down tree trunks like those bastard kids that rollerblade down the handrails in front of the post office.

The infant Tarzan (voiced by Alex D. Linz, Home Alone 3) and his parents land on a deserted island after narrowly escaping death on a flaming ship. They quickly build a remarkable treehouse (a la Swiss Family Robinson) and seem fairly content spending their lives in their remote surroundings. But one day, a bloodthirsty leopard slays both parents, leaving the tot to be discovered by Kala (Glenn Close, 101 Dalmatians), a gorilla that ironically lost her only child to the same deadly feline.

When Kala brings the human child home to the tight-knit gorilla community, she is met with great resistance – especially from her husband and primate leader, Kerchak (Lance Henriksen, Millenium). The boy grows up feeling like an outcast, but is able to befriend a similarly aged gorilla named Terk (annoyingly voiced by nasally K-Mart pitch-person and media whore Rosie O'Donnell) and a bumbling elephant, Tantor (Wayne Knight, Seinfeld’s Newman).

Years later, an older and more chiseled Tarzan (Tony Goldwyn, Kiss the Girls) turns everything around when he saves Kerchak’s life after the savage leopard attacks the patriarchal figure. In an instant, Tarzan becomes a man, unknowingly avenges the death of his birth parents, wins the affection of Kerchak and develops his trademark yell. But the excitement doesn’t stop there. Almost immediately after dispatching the deadly leopard, the jungle is jolted by the sound of gunfire. There are visitors on the island!

Of course, the visitors include Jane (Minnie Driver, An Ideal Husband), the girl who would be Mrs. Tarzan. Almost instantly, she strays from her three-party group – father Porter (Nigel Hawthorne, The Winslow Boy) and trigger-happy bad guy Clayton (Brian Blessed, Boss Nass in Episode One) – and quickly finds herself being chased by a bunch of angry baboons. Tarzan saves her and realizes that Jane is more like him than his monkey brethren.

Having not been trained in human social skills, Tarzan shocks Jane by first mimicking her and then violating her "personal boundaries" by looking up her dress and jamming his head between her perky Disney breasts. Needless to say, the two hit it off and Tarzan even considers leaving the island to return home with Jane. If she had simply put out, he probably would have gone with her, leaving the film with a completely different ending.

Tarzan was directed by Chris Buck (his debut) and Kevin Lima (A Goofy Movie) and features new music from former Genesis frontman Phil Collins. His songs replace the big, flashy musical numbers that usually plague Disney ‘toons, leaving precious little time to develop any semblance of a story. But that isn’t the case here – the absence of singing characters is welcomed in any film.

1:30 – Rated , but contains some seriously depressing and violent scenes