"The Jungle -- here I was born, and here my parents died when I was but an infant. I would have soon perished too, had I not been found by a kindly she-ape named Kala who adopted me as her own and taught me the ways of the wild. I learned quickly and grew stronger each day. And now I share the frendship and trust of all jungle animals. The Jungle is filled with beauty and danger, and lost cities filled with good and evil. This is my domain, and I protect those who come here for I am Tazan, Lord of the Jungle."

Tarzan learns to climb, hunt, jump, and the animal language. He finds a lot of friends, like the wise old elephants or Kerki, young chimpanzees, but also enemies, like the mighty and strong lion. One day, however, Tarzan is already 18 years old, people come to the jungle. It is the first time that Tarzan sees people. He soon discovers that this stranger he eats a lot of similar, as the members of his family, the monkey. Tarzan must decide.

Language: German

Rated: No age restriction

Studio: Universal / carousel

Release date: 30th July 1999

Playing time: 45 minutes

By definition, “An approximation is a representation of something that is not exact, but still close enough to be useful. Although approximation is most often applied to numbers, it is also frequently applied to such things as mathematical functions, shapes, and physical laws.” Now I want to use the term to talk about animation. 

When I was younger, I didn't figure out why my father called me “Jai”, until I started to watch the Ron Ely’s Movies. I did not know anything about Tarzan, a man with a loincloth in the middle of the jungle, living with a little boy with that name. I recall myself making a lot of questions to my father just to know more about this show and the fascinating man called Tarzan. Every Sunday I always made the possible to be on time in front of the TV set, to watch a new episode. 

Some years later, I was charmed with some Tarzan's comic strips. Today I can say that it was the art of Russ Manning what I saw in the last page of the magazine, sold with the newspaper. While I learned to read better in comics, I also learned a little how to draw Tarzan with the help of the comics. Russ Manning art is precise and easy to follow due to the clean lines and plane colors. Although some images were not easy to reproduce, I always drew the main characters and never paid attention to the background.  But what I wanted more was to draw to Tarzan moving. When I realized that my decision of being an animation producer would not go to anywhere, I let my proposal until now. And my research of all time was to ask myself if I could make move the Russ Manning's Tarzan. I imagined this Tarzan acting like Ron Ely, and each animal and letters running in the animation like in TV. 

If we see clearly, the lines of Russ Manning are not like a Disney Drawing. Many lines can represent to a shadow on bodies or on objects in order to get the volume. Black is the main color to outline any object and the rest colors are under it as in the CMYK format. Producing and reproducing a video under this technique is nothing easy, but I always wanted to see the difference with respect to other productions. 

The Tarzan’s movies which are starred by Ron Ely, have a nice Intro accompanied by many animals of the jungle and the great band of sound with the melody of Sidney Lee, Tarzan’s March. So I decided to draw Ron Ely instead the Russ Manning’s Tarzan. I searched in Google lots of books about animation and the first thing I learned is that animations are made with only 10 fps (frames per second), good for me because I was unconsciously decided to make 30 fps just as in the original movie. And I couldn’t do more than start to draw frame by frame in the computer, and learning about the subject while I was working on it. 

I don’t know how many days I spent in this work because I didn’t make it continuously, but sure it could spend at least, two or three months. In some cases I was helped by the technique called “rotoscoping”, used by Disney Studio in the first movies, but later I decided to produce my own drawings no matter how long it would take, because the idea was to learn to draw as the great artists of the 2D animation or traditional animation. In other cases I was helped by 3D models, just to learn how the movement of and object is visually distributed in time to define its speed. This is called Interpolation. But later I realized that with some mathematics equations of degree three or four, they can tell you how the movement is.  But at the end of this perfectionism of the computer, you decide whether or not the movement is right for your eyes, by putting in one more frame (inbetween) or deleting one or two.

The other stuff was the sound. Putting the sound along with the frames is just another difficult work; well, at least at the beginning. So you have to take into account the seconds in that every group of frames begins, which tells you whether the movie is going to finish at the same time and agreed with the band of sound. Anyway, it is like any other work that you can make for yourself. Now, enjoy this animation I made for you all.