Tarzan

Disney's film of Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1912 novel, the last of the studio's hand-drawn renaissance run. It keeps the frame Burroughs built and very little else: the shipwrecked English parents, the ape mother, the boy raised without language, the arrival of a scientific party with a daughter. Kala, Kerchak, Jane and Clayton all come from the book. Filed MEDIUM rather than HIGH deliberately. The novel's plot after the first act is almost entirely absent, and so is its racial politics, which Disney had no intention of reproducing and which is a large part of what the book actually is.

Burroughs was writing eighteen years after Mowgli and the feral child was Kipling's invention as a popular form: a human infant orphaned in the wild, adopted by animals, taught their law, and then forced to choose between their world and his own. Tarzan keeps the structure and changes the politics, making his hero an English aristocrat whose breeding shows through the jungle. The debt is often noted and Burroughs acknowledged reading Kipling.