For twenty-five years, the Disney classic Tarzan has entertained audiences both young and old. The film, based on the popular Edgar Rice Burroughs novel series, is considered to be the last film of the Disney Renaissance, a period of films that helped rejuvenate the company and reestablish it as an animation juggernaut.

The story of a man raised by apes in the late nineteenth century lent itself well to an animated feature with wild and imaginative settings and action sequences. The last real animated “jungle movie” that Disney was the 1967 film The Jungle Book. Now a new generation of creatives would have a go at the unique settings of the which African jungles and the exotic wildlife.

The film was co-directed by Kevin Klima and Chris Buck, with Tab Murphy, fresh off of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, brought on to write the initial treatment. Other writers, such as Bob Tzudiker and None White,...