Wit & Attitude Quote by Ralph Bakshi

Bakshi’s praise lands like a backhanded compliment on purpose: he’s not crowning Tarzan as great cinema so much as rescuing a craft he thinks Disney had been letting drift. The tell is how quickly he brackets his admiration. Story? Not his thing. Tarzan’s face? A design compromise. But the “traditional animation” gets the standing ovation. He’s separating the machine-made product decisions from the animator’s hand, insisting the labor still mattered even when the corporate taste didn’t.

The subtext is an old-school director drawing a line in the sand during a late-’90s pivot point. Tarzan (1999) arrives at the end of Disney’s Renaissance, when studios were selling spectacle and synergy as much as character and line. It also showcased techniques like Deep Canvas, a hybrid that let hand-drawn figures move through digitally rendered environments. Bakshi’s choice of words - “traditional,” “spectacular” - reads as a defense of the human mark inside a pipeline increasingly flirting with digital dominance.

Bakshi is a particularly pointed messenger because he’s spent his career pushing animation away from Disney’s family-friendly orthodoxy, toward adult messiness and stylistic risk. So when he compliments Disney, it’s not fan service; it’s a professional salute across enemy lines. He’s saying: you may have sanded down the face, you may have softened the story, but the movement still sings. For an animator-director, that’s the real verdict.