# Glen Keane studied 13 gorillas. So why does Tarzan move like a skater?

- Series: [How It's Clipped](https://miu.fm/howitsclipped.md)
- Published: 2026-10-19
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitsclipped/glen-keane-studied-13-gorillas-so-why-does-tarzan-move-like

## Story

Glen Keane studied 13 gorillas. So why does Tarzan move like a skater?

Glen Keane, supervising animator on Disney's Tarzan (1999), said Burroughs's Tarzan "was incredible and nothing like the one I've seen in the Hollywood films": "a wild man, somebody that the adrenaline had to be pumping through." "He is more flexible than any human being that ever lived. And he also got no fear. ... You really have to go back and rethink everything about why he does what he does." Animators have a rule for that: "The visual path of action from one extreme to another is always described by an arc" (John Lasseter, 1987), and on a vine the knot sets the arc. Keane did go to Uganda: "there was this family of thirteen gorillas closer to me than me to you." But the new move came from home. "When I was searching to see how Tarzan would move, I noticed what my son was watching. He is really in all these skateboarding and snowboarding and extreme sport videos." "What if, instead of jumping on vines, he was a kind of surfer, surfing on the branches." His first reaction to his son's skating: "He is going to kill himself. Why would people want to do that?" And his lesson: "Everything that works is based on real life. It's not because Frank and Ollie's book says it."

The vine, the branches and the figure are our own recreations, not film footage.

Who do you know that skates? Show them where Tarzan learned it.

Sources: Glen Keane, interview with Didier Ghez, 2 May 1997, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Montreuil (Animated Views); Jim Fanning, "Did You Know? Seven Swinging Facts About Disney's Tarzan", D23, 18 Jun 2019; John Lasseter, "Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation", SIGGRAPH 1987.
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).

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