ME TARZAN ... YOU DISNEY; ANIMATION GIANT STRETCHES TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE A DIFFERENT BURROUGHS HERO.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

One of the best-known pop-culture creations of the 20th century has finally joined forces with the era's top pop-culture factory.

Tarzan - the jungle hero of 24 Edgar Rice Burroughs books, 47 live-action movies, TV shows, comics and other artifacts too numerous to mention - is now the subject of the Walt Disney Co.'s 37th fully animated feature film.

If this seems like a long-overdue natural, that's because it is.

``About three months ago, we got a letter that Burroughs wrote in 1936 to his son Jack, about a possible animated version of Tarzan,'' notes producer Bonnie Arnold. ``It said three things: It has to look naturalistic, it must have a great deal of humor, and it must approximate Disney excellence.

``I thought that was an interesting validation of what we'd been doing,'' she adds. ``But if we'd have seen that letter about three years ago, when we were first starting, we'd have been totally intimidated.''

Not like they weren't anyway. Tarzan is known to millions as the ultimate Ape Man, not big on conversation but one of the all-time great hollerers. The popular Johnny Weissmuller film series of the 1930s and '40s pretty much fixed the not-so-smart, ``Me Tarzan, you Jane'' image in the public imagination forevermore.

But those who actually read Burroughs (the initial ``Tarzan of the Apes'' story was first published in 1912) knew that the King of the Jungle - actually a shipwrecked English aristocrat raised from babyhood by African gorillas - was a superhuman combination of animal physical ability and outstanding intelligence. Could both the Burroughs fans' and the general public's very different expectations be satisfied in a cartoon that, at the same time, would appeal to kids with no knowledge of the pulp hero's previous incarnations?

``Initially, I didn't want to do it at all,'' says co-director Kevin Lima (``A Goofy Movie''). ``I was actually pretty skeptical about the material when it was first offered to me. Why make another movie that has been made, seemingly to me, hundreds of times? I didn't think there was room for a new Tarzan film that could speak to contemporary audiences.

``But then I went back and read the book, and I was actually kind of shocked that the tale that was in the book had really never been put down on film. I think part of that was because a human actor could never do half of the things that Burroughs describes. The next thing I thought was that the movies never really explored the relationship between Tarzan and the animal world, specifically the apes, in a satisfying way. That seemed like another reason to do it.''

How to do it was a whole other matter. Anthropomorphic apes and other creatures would hardly pose a challenge to Disney, whom many feel reached its animation zenith with its last Africa-set feature, ``The Lion King,'' in 1994. But that was set on semi-arid plains and hills. What the filmmakers needed was a method of putting their animals and animal-man in a convincing, primeval rain forest.

``We wanted a naturalistic look, so the audience could relate to Tarzan's journey a little better,'' explains co-director Chris Buck. ``We took a research trip to Africa, and being there, in this three-dimensional world, surrounded by the beautiful, lush jungle, we were struggling with how we could bring this back to the screen.''

Even with the great advances Disney has pioneered over the last decade, traditional cel animation was still a stubbornly two-dimensional art form. The solution lay in a new computer graphics program that Disney dubbed Deep Canvas.

``We've invented a lot of tricks, and we've had a lot of really interesting, technological breakthroughs at the studio, but we still weren't getting some of the shots that we really wanted to get,'' says veteran Disney layout supervisor Daniel St. Pierre, who served as art director for ``Tarzan.'' ``Especially given that Tarzan is so mobile and could move through the treetops effortlessly, it was important to me to be able to take the camera up there, too, and give the audience a similar kind of experience to what Tarzan would have.''

To achieve his aim, St. Pierre approached CG supervisor Eric Daniels, whose team then set about the mammoth applied-mathematics task of developing a program that could change complex forest dimensions, details and directions as fast as the new, hyper-agile Tarzan could swing through them.

``The process we came up with basically does what a painter does,'' explains Daniels, who divides his own time between computer work and traditional pencil drawing. ``A painter creates a painting by building it up out of hundreds of thousands of brush strokes, dabbing a little bit of paint there, a bit of green here, then changing it to slightly bluer or darker.

``Our rendering software repaints those brush strokes over and over, hundreds of times - but each time it paints them slightly differently. It paints this stroke a little over to the left because that tree is moving past us, or that stroke up a little bit because that leaf is moving up at that particular moment. So when you see the `Tarzan' backgrounds moving in three dimensions, you're actually seeing hundreds of individual paintings that were created using this software.''

That was only the environment. For the main attraction, Tarzan himself, the filmmakers sought out Disney's most accomplished character animator of the modern era, Glen Keane. After bringing the likes of the Little Mermaid, ``Beauty's'' Beast, Aladdin and Pocahontas to screen life, Keane had taken a well-deserved sabbatical in Paris, where he spent a year studying the great masters and anatomy drawing.

He had essentially decided to stay with his family in the French capital when team ``Tarzan'' came calling. But the chance to work on a childhood favorite was too hard to resist. (Keane ended up enjoying the best of both worlds; while most of the movie was animated in Burbank, he supervised Tarzan's animation at Disney's Paris studio).

The artist's father, ``Family Circus'' cartoonist Bill Keane, had taught his son how to draw using the influential ``Dynamic Anatomy'' book by Burne Hogarth, one of the outstanding artists who drew the ``Tarzan'' newspaper comic strip. The youthful Keane was also such a big fan of fantasy painter Frank Frazetta that he never got around to reading his paperback copy of ``Tarzan of the Apes.''

``Every time I'd try to read the book, I couldn't resist the temptation to try to draw that great Frazetta cover,'' Keane recalls. So he, too, was startled when he finally got around to reading Burroughs in preparation for the movie.

``I realized that this guy was going to be a lot of fun to do,'' Keane notes, ``because the only way to bring him to life was by going through the process myself, mentally, that Tarzan had to to learn to move and to survive, and to base all of your movements on animal study.''

Well, that and skateboarding. Keane not only raided his own childhood memories for Tarzan's look; his own son, Max, inspired the animated ape man's need-for-speed manner of locomotion.

``I had been looking at Johnny Weissmuller swinging on the vine and realized that that was not the way I wanted Tarzan to move,'' Keane reveals. ``It was a passive way of moving through the jungle; the vine does all the work, and he hangs on. It's also just lateral movement across the screen.

``I was looking for something where Tarzan could be more active, aggressive, attacking the jungle. At the same time, my son was skateboarding all the time across from the Eiffel Tower at a place called the Trocadero. All the kids did it there, and they never did it on anything flat. It was always angles, something dangerous that could break your arm. He was coming home with these bloody knees, and I said, `Max, why are you doing this?'

``He said, `Well, it's fun,' and it just clicked for me. In all these extreme sports videos that he'd been bringing home, there was this thrill in the adrenaline rush that was the fun that they were looking for. And for Tarzan to move through the trees, it couldn't be just the getting from Point A to Point B; it had to be the getting there was the fun for him.''

Thus, Tarzan swings in every which direction using every limb God gave him, and surfs along gnarly, moss-covered branches like he was shooting the curl at Zuma.

But although the visual aspects of ``Tarzan'' are its most memorable elements, much more was required to make it into a mass Disney entertainment. Voice casting was, of course, crucial. Tony Goldwyn (``Ghost'') provided the adult Tarzan's alternately articulate and grunting voice. He also did a pretty good job of approximating the signature Weissmuller Tarzan yell - with a little help.

``It was a whole big deal trying to get the yell just right, we kept going back and forth,'' Goldwyn admits. ``It's mainly my voice, but they helped it electronically by extending it. I think they may even have other voices in there, like opera singers helping with the yodel.''

Minnie Driver essays Tarzan's spunky English love interest Jane, Glenn Close and Lance Henriksen voice his gorilla ``parents,'' and Rosie O'Donnell is his comic ape pal, Terk. The film's musical numbers, which are mostly played over montages rather than ``sung'' by the characters, were produced and performed by crooning drummer Phil Collins, who was chosen specifically for his percussive sound.

``Balancing the tone of the film was probably the most difficult thing that we did,'' admits director Lima. ``Because you have, basically, three elements: the drama, the comedy and the action-adventure. All three of them have to be perfectly balanced in order for it to feel like one texture. You don't want the sidekicks to suddenly take over the movie.''

Still, some Burroughs fans are wary of potential over-Disneyfication.

``Obviously, animation can portray Tarzan interacting with animals more intimately and can create ideal backdrops, especially when you're talking about a fantasy Africa,'' respected Burroughs authority James Van Hise acknowledges. ``But a fully animated feature is inevitably going to have more comedy elements in it, which seems to be considered a necessity to balance out any of the serious stuff.''

One expert, while noting that some compromises have been made, is nevertheless thrilled by how true Disney's ``Tarzan'' is to the spirit of the books.

``The live movies magnificently lacked my grandfather's characters and his action and a lot of the elements that he made famous in the books, and it just frustrated the daylights out of him,'' says Danton Burroughs. ``This movie brings Tarzan back up to the heroic, articulate stature that he always should have had. This is the most fantastic portrayal of Tarzan that, I think, the public will ever have seen.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) STILL HANGING AROUND

Disney reimagines `Tarzan'

(2--Color) The latest computer animation shows the main character moving rapidly through a highly detailed rain forest in Disney's ``Tarzan,'' opening Friday.

(3) The character of Jane is voiced by Minnie Driver, Tarzan by Tony Goldwyn in the animated film based on the story by Edgar Rice Burroughs.