Tarzan / Tropes A to F

Tarzan Trope Examples
A - F | G - Z

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• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Much of the scenery, though it's integrated well thanks to the revolutionary "Deep Canvas" process.

A

• Accidental Suicide: During the final battle, Clayton gets tangled in a mass of jungle vines and tries to hack them away with his machete, but one vine gets caught around his neck and he ends up accidentally hanging himself.
• Accidental Tickle Torture: When they first meet, Jane tries to keep Tarzan away by pushing him back with her bare foot. This backfires on her when Tarzan starts wiggling her toes, inadvertently tickling her.
  • Accidental Pervert: After the above mentioned tickling, Tarzan then tries to look up Jane's dress out of innocent curiousity, not knowing any better about how wrong this is. Jane kicks him in the face with her bare foot.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: When Kala takes Tarzan to his parents' treehouse.
• Acoustic License: Lil' baby Tarzan must have some monstrously powerful lungs such that Kala can hear his crying coming from the top of the treehouse, across the rope bridge, through the jungle, and all the way to her while she's standing next to a waterfall.
• Adaptational Heroism: Kerchak was a monstrous Killer Gorilla in the book. Here, while he disapproves of Tarzan at first, he's instead a stern but benevolent leader of the gorillas.
• Adaptational Nationality: Jane is American in the books (and pretty much every other adaptation), but British here.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the books, William Clayton is Tarzan's cousin and is only looking for proof of Tarzan's father's death so he can inherit the family title, Lord Greystoke, and, finding Tarzan uninterested in returning to England or claiming the title himself, claims Tarzan died with them, and doesn't do anything villainous. Here he's the villain and unrelated to Tarzan.
• Adaptation Distillation:
  • In the film, Tarzan is raised by gorillas. In the books, he is raised by "Mangani", a fictional ape species, while gorillas are Always Chaotic Evil. Disney presumably changed this to reflect how science has marched on since the days of Burroughs, revealing gorillas to be Gentle Giants.
  • In a non-zoology-related example, the book series was filled with serial-style adventures, including sci-fi and fantasy elements. The movie keeps its focus on Tarzan's identity crisis and his relationship with Jane. The TV series, in an Expansion Pack World way, included more of the pulp fantasy elements. It should be noted the pulp fantasy elements did not appear until after the first book Tarzan of the Apes, which this film is an adaptation of.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: In the books, Tarzan and Jane have black and blonde hair respectively, while here their hair is in different shades of brown.
• Adaptation Species Change:
  • Sabor was a lioness, but here, she's changed to a leopardess, most likely to represent the fact that lions aren't necessarily the Kings (and Queens) of the Jungle, an environment where leopards are far more common.
  • Also in the book, the apes Tarzan lived with weren't gorillas, but a fictional species of ape called mangani.
  • In the original books, Tarzan has a monkey sidekick named Nkima, but in the classic films and live-action TV shows he has a chimp sidekick named Cheeta. Here, he has two sidekicks: Terk, a gorilla and Tantor, an elephant. It should be noted that Nkima did not debut until Tarzan and the Lost Empire, the twelfth book in the series. This film is an adaptation of the first book Tarzan of the Apes and Terk and Tantor are both based on characters featured or mentioned in that novel.
• Adoption Angst: Tarzan knows from childhood that he's different from the other apes, but it's only after he meets Jane that he realizes he might be a different species all together. This culminates in Kala taking him to the tree house where she found him, revealing that he was adopted. While he makes his decision to go with the Porters to England, he tells her that she is his mother, no matter what.
• Adorably Precocious Child: Tarzan as a kid.
• An Aesop: Your family is where loyalty and love are found. Tarzan spends the entire film trying to emulate the gorillas and become useful to the troop in order to earn Kerchak’s approval but the only two instances where Kerchak is proud of Tarzan is when he fights to defend the troop, first against Sabor then against the pirates, proving his loyalty and love for his family. In the end, Kerchak entrusts the troop to Tarzan in his final moments with the confidence that Tarzan will never abandon his family.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: The infant who would become Tarzan gets his hair ruffled by his human father after the baby points out a perfect tree in which to build their new home.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: All elephants in this movie are red. According to Word of God, the animators were inspired by images of elephants that smear themselves with red-toned dust or mud (to keep off insects).
• Ambiguous Situation: It is never made clear whether the animals are Talking Animals that Masquerade as normal animals around everyone except Tarzan, or if they actually can't talk.
• Anachronism Stew: A very mild case of mixing Victorian elements, but the Porters tell Tarzan that on returning to England he will be a celebrity who everyone from Charles Darwin to Rudyard Kipling will want to meet. However, Kipling did not publish his first collection of poems until 1886, four years after Darwin's death in 1882. Aside from the Kipling reference, however, the elements are remarkably consistent; the penny-farthing bike, the transition from wooden ship at the beginning to steamship, the magic-lantern technology, and most tellingly the comet pin the date of the main story down to 1882. The sequel series stretched the anachronisms a bit further. In addition, after Tantor dives into the water in the climax, he raises his trunk and there's a POV shot of his trunk as submarine sounds are heard.
• Anger Born of Worry: In the wake of the elephant stampede, Tarzan is left unconscious, and Terk begs him not to die. When Tarzan wakes up, a relieved Terk immediately hugs him before throwing him back to the ground and calling him an idiot.
  Terk: Tarzan, buddy! Buddy, come on. Tarzan, don't die on me. Don't die on me. You're weren't supposed to do it!
  Tantor: Get away from there! Don't you know a piranha can strip your flesh in seconds?
  Terk:: What?! He's not a piranha! He's—
  (Tarzan coughs, splutters, and wakes up)
  Terk:: He's alive! He's alive! He's alive!
  Tantor: He's alive!
  Terk:: (hugs Tarzan) He's ali— (realizing the situation) You idiot! (throws Tarzan back to the ground) You nearly give me a heart attack. Ya happy?
  • Kala also expresses this briefly shortly when she arrives at the scene.
    Kala: (quickly getting hold of Tarzan in relief but out of fear) Oh, you scared me! What happened?
• Animal Stampede: The young Tarzan accidentally starts an elephant stampede when he tries to snatch some tail hair from them, and the elephants mistake him for a piranha. The elephants almost trample a baby gorilla, but Kerchak is fortunately quick enough to save the infant.
• Animal Talk: Only Tarzan and the viewer get to hear what the animals are saying. Jane, Clayton, and Professor Porter can't hear the animals talking, only hearing hooting sounds from the gorillas, screeches by the baboons, and trumpeting from Tantor.
• Animals Not to Scale: The green tree python from the "Son of Man" sequence is as big as a reticulated python and even longer, despite the species being a small snake at only 2 meters in length.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • Regarding baby Tarzan.
  Kerchak: Kala, I cannot let you put our family in danger!
  Kala: (holding baby Tarzan up) Does he look dangerous to you?!
  • After meeting the humans, Tarzan asks this question that even Kerchak was stung by.
  Tarzan: Why are you threatened by anyone different from you?
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Tarzan's often able to win over others' sympathy through his eyes, including the gorillas. In reality, gorillas do not like direct eye contact, perceiving it as a challenge. Locking eyes with one of them is demanding a fight.
  • A human walking on his knuckles as Tarzan does would be extremely painful, and cause severe damage to the bones in the hands. Gorillas get away with this due to thicker knuckle bones relative to their weight and arms longer than their legs, unlike humans. As he's spent most of his life walking on all fours, Tarzan's pretty fortunate that his back isn't wrecked as well.
  • The alpha baboon has the colorful face of a mandrill, something real baboons lack. Also a closeup shot of attacking baboon shows 3 incisors instead of 4.
  • The female African elephants in the film are portrayed without tusks. Female Asian elephants have no tusks, but African ones do. Related to this, all the elephants are humpbacked like Asian elephants rather than saddlebacked that African elephants are.
  • Played for Laughs with Tantor's trunk, which he accurately uses as a snorkel like real elephants... and as a periscope, complete with sonar noises! Does he have eyes inside his trunk? Or maybe it's just a visual representation of him sniffing?
  • In a scene, gorillas are shown eating termites, fishing for them with sticks. While lowland gorillas do occasionally eat termites, only certain tribes of chimpanzees were known to use a stick to fish for them at the time of the film's release. However, mountain gorillas were discovered doing this in 2014.
  • There are quite a few liberties taken with Sabor, mainly for story reasons and making her as scary as possible:
    • The leopard killed Tarzan's birth family when the latter was only an infant, and is somehow still alive and dangerous when Tarzan is an 18-20 year old adult, despite the fact that leopards don't usually live past their late teens. There are exceptions, but such an elderly cat would definitely not be so insanely fast and agile. Granted, Sabor dying of old age instead of being slain in an epic fight with Tarzan would have been very anti-climactic.
    • Sabor is shown to have slitted pupils. Big cats actually have round pupils, while slit-pupils are present only in small cats. Obviously due to Rule of Scary.
    • Sabor has sparse rosettes and they are rather large, more akin to a jaguar's, namely to simplify the design.
    • She's frequently heard uttering cougar yells, even though leopards can only roar like their lion and tiger cousins.
    • Sabor is shown as being a close match for Kerchak in terms of strength and even knocking him to the ground so that Tarzan has to intervene. The heaviest leopard ever recorded weighed just over 200 pounds, which combined with the fact that Silverback gorillas weigh about 400 pounds on average (combined with the issues relating to Sabor's age, as mentioned above) means that in real life Kerchak would have beat her to death in seconds, or at the very least broken several major bones the first time he threw her against a tree with all his strength.
  • Albeit with great difficulty, Tarzan does manage to physically hold Kerchak back to stop him from attacking Jane. Though it is difficult to gauge their strength with any precision, a silverback male gorilla usually tips the scales at about 400 pounds and is many times stronger than any human. Even if we assume Kerchak is holding back, a human attempting to take on an angry silverback in real life would literally be crushed in a heartbeat.
  • Hippos are portrayed as docile and passive creatures, one is even shown letting young Tarzan ride on its snout. Anyone with even a faint familiarity with hippos knows that in Real Life they're the exact opposite. Could be justified by Tarzan being able to communicate with the hippos, and one hippo is shown getting aggressive during battle against Clayton. Hippos are also portrayed eating water plants in the daytime, when real-life hippos are nocturnal grazers.
  • Pythons are portrayed with a pair of large fangs. Fangs are only present in venomous snakes, and only a few species possess large ones. Pythons are non-venomous constrictors.
  • The parrots (resembling a Lilian's lovebird with the body shape of a macaw) from the "Strangers Like Me" sequence have three toes in front and one in back, instead of two toes in front and two in back.
  • A rather odd example is the semi-scientifically accurate scientific names Prof. Porter uses to describe various animals. He calls hippos Hippopotamus amphibius (correct), rhinos Rhinoceros bihornius (Rhinoceros bicornis was the scientific name of the black rhinoceros during the time period the movie takes place, before it was placed in its own genus; Diceros bicornis, with the former still referring to Indian and Javan rhinos), and baboons Theropithecus babunious (Theropithecus is the scientific name of the highland-dwelling gelada, a cousin of true baboons, while the latter are classed in Papio).
• Artistic License – Physics: Either this trope is in effect or Clayton employs the two strongest men in the world, considering how easily they carry Kala (a female gorilla, who would usually weigh about 200-300 pounds) and a heavy steel cage (which would be around 500 pounds) without any signs of strain or difficulty.
• Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!:
  Jane: Put me down! Put me down!
  [sees baboons coming closer]
  Jane: Pick me up! Pick me up! Pick me uuuuuup!
  • Later on, said by Clayton: "Get up, get up! ... Don't get up."
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Kerchak and Kala often bicker onscreen, but they do have their moments that show that they genuinely care for each other. Kerchak, for example, is visibly relieved when Kala returns from collecting Tarzan... then thumps his chest and roars angrily when she says she is keeping Tarzan... then gives in, but tells her Tarzan won't replace their son. Later in the movie when all the gorillas are imprisoned by Clayton, it is only when Kala is thrown in a cage that makes Kerchak utterly flip and tear the net imprisoning him to shreds.

B

• Battle Strip: As Tarzan swings to the rescue of Kerchak and the other gorillas from Clayton and his men, we're treated to a shot of him stripping off his shirt mid swing and leaving it on a log behind him. By the time he arrives at his destination, he's back in the loincloth. We never see what happens to his pants. However, given that he wears them in the series that follows this film, we can assume he later retrieved them.
• Berserk Button: After Tarzan comes home and is shot - and Kala is only just missed by the bullet - Kerchak goes into one humongous rage.
• Big Damn Heroes: Surprisingly, and not without a little bit of defying the laws of physics, this is first pulled off by Terk and Tantor, who realized Tarzan was in danger and swam all the way to the ship, climbed on to it (somehow) and decimated its crew to save him. This is notable in that, had it not been for them, Tarzan would have been unable to get out of this situation and thus he'd be unable to save his gorilla family from being captured.
  • In turn and thanks to the above, Tarzan gets to lead the subsequent Big Damn Heroes moment, swinging in yelling at the last second to save the gorillas from Clayton and the rest of the poachers.
• Big "NO!": Tarzan utters one whilst on Clayton's ship. It's loud enough to get Terk and Tantor's attention.
• Bilingual Dialogue: Implied to be the case with the elephants and the gorillas/Tarzan. We generally only hear them talking to each other in Translation Convention, but when Tantor rescues Tarzan, he greets him with a trademark elephant trumpet that seems to be intended to mean something beyond, well, just being an elephant trumpet.
• Binomium ridiculus: Professor Porter refers to rhinos and baboons as Rhinoceros bihornius and Theropithecus babunious respectively, neither of which is the actual scientific names of any real-life species of rhinoceros or baboon. Theropithecus is a legitimate genus, but it refers to the gelada, a cousin of baboons living in the Ethiopian highlands, while baboons belong to the genus Papio. Similarly, Rhinoceros is a valid genus... for the one-horned Indian rhino.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: After Clayton is fatally hanged by the jungle vines, his machete falls to the forest floor and lands with the blade pointing straight down.
• Bloodless Carnage:
  • Tarzan (superficially) and Kerchak (fatally) are both shot without any visible blood.
  • Averted when Sabor and Tarzan both receive gashes during their fight, although there's no dripping or excessive gore.
  • Averted right at the beginning of the movie, when Kala enters the cabin, you can see bloody leopard footprints that lead to the (presumably partially-consumed) bodies of Tarzan's parents. This in addition to the fact that, you know, it's a Disney movie where we get to see dead bodies on screen.
• Bloody Handprint: Bloody pawprints, actually, and the moment Kala sees them on the floor of Tarzan's cabin, next to the bodies of his parents, is when she realizes what she's dealing with.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Between the bloody pawprints in Tarzan's cabin, and the blood drawn by Sabor and Tarzan during their fight, this is arguably the bloodiest film in the entire Disney Animated Canon.
• Bottomless Magazines: Clayton gets several shots in a row from a double-barreled shotgun.
• Bowdlerise: When Disney Channel aired the film, the Shadow Discretion Shot of Clayton's fate was removed.
• Brainy Brunette: Jane.
• Break-Up/Make-Up Scenario: Between Tarzan and his whole clan.
• Brick Joke: One of the educational slides inspires Tarzan to present Jane with flowers, and later when he tries to give her the flowers he kneels in the exact same pose as the man in the slide, and in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it gag he almost forgets to put his hand over his chest.
• Bright Is Not Good: Sabor and Clayton are associated with vibrant yellow hues, and are the main antagonists.
• Bring It Back Alive: Clayton aims to do this with Tarzan's gorilla family. Aside from Kerchak, who he decides would be "better off stuffed".
• Buffy Speak: Jane's description of Tarzan on their first meeting:
  Jane: And all this time I thought you were just a big-wild-quiet-silent-person-thing.
• Building Swing: Tarzan uses his Vine Swing skills on a boat too.

C

• Calling the Old Man Out: It's downplayed, but when Kerchak is telling the troop to stay away from the humans, Tarzan, whom Kerchak has shunned all his life for being different, runs up to him, takes a fighting pose, and shouts, "Why are you threatened by anyone different from you?!"
• The Cameo: Mrs. Potts and Chip show up in the human's camp, albeit without faces.
• Cartoon Creature: Most of the animals in the film are real species, but the parrots that appear during "Strangers Like Me" may be an exception. Their color scheme is similar to that of the Lilian's lovebird, but their body shape is all wrong.
• Cats Are Mean: Sabor, although "mean" is a bit of an understatement given that it commits several murders and tries to commit several more.
• The Cavalry:
  • In the form of Tantor of all creatures, who (along with Terk riding him) jumps off a cliff, swims up to a boat filled with mooks, and pulls off quite the Big Damn Heroes moment to save Tarzan.
  • Later, Kerchak is at gunpoint when the cavalry arrives in the form of Tarzan - then Tantor, Terk, Jane and the Professor - then the other elephants, a hippo, a rhino (who apparently just got caught up in the general excitement), and finally the baboon pack.
• Censored Child Death: While Kerchak and Kala are asleep, their baby runs off just long enough for Sabor to kill him. They wake up to his screams and try to run to his aid. Kerchak realizes what is happening when they hear a high-pitched shriek, and holds his wife back. The next day, he gives her a saddened, worried look when she lags behind the troop.
• Character Catchphrase: Tarzan's famous call.
• Chasing a Butterfly: In the opening scene, Kala and Kerchak's baby follows a frog, which leads him to Sabor the leopard.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Tarzan teaches Jane a phrase in gorilla talk, and at the end of the movie, she repeats the phrase to the gorilla tribe. The phrase was "Jane stays with Tarzan." (pronounced as "oh ee eh ah oo")
  • Tarzan also teaches Jane how to vine swing, which she uses in the final battle.
  • Tarzan's ability to imitate the sound of a rifle with his mouth - he uses it to intimidate Clayton.
  • The first thing we see adult Tarzan do is show Tantor how to use his trunk like a snorkel. Tantor uses this later when swimming out to the ship Tarzan and his friends are trapped on so he can clim aboard and save them.
• Civilized Animal: Inverted with Tarzan, an uncivilized human.
• Clothing Damage:
  • Tarzan's biological father had his clothes damaged and tattered while lowering his wife and their infant son from the burning ship at the start of the film.
  • Jane has this happen to her yellow dress during the very start of the baboon chase. As she runs from the baboons, a low branch snags the skirt of her dress and tears a piece off.
  • As Tarzan gets captured by Clayton's thugs onboard the ship, his late father's suit (that he's wearing at the time) is damaged in the struggle. Without the jacket and shoes, the shirt gets more tears later on as Tarzan tries to break free from the hold where he, Jane, Porter and the ship crew are imprisoned.
• Coming of Age Story: The movie is the coming-of-age story for Tarzan, who for most of his life was ostracised by a few of the gorillas on the count of being different. With the arrival of Clayton and the Porters, he realises that there are other 'creatures' like him and the film is basically about him having to choose between civilisation and his jungle upbringing.
• Company Cross References: The tea set in the Porters' campsite resembles Mrs. Potts and Chip.
• Composite Character: Kerchak. He's still the leader, but this version has more in common with Tublat (who was Kala's mate and didn't care much for Tarzan). He is also much more benign than both Kerchak (who was dangerous, especially during bouts of madness) and Tublat (who was at least a very 'disagreeable' fellow who no-one missed when Tarzan killed him) from the novel.
• Conflict Killer: Sabor's fight ultimately leads Kerchak to not only apologizing to Tarzan for not understanding he is part of the troop but promoting him as the leader.
• Cub Cues Protective Parent: Jane encounters a cute little baby baboon which steals her journal. After Jane steals it back, the baby baboon starts crying, calling the attention of its mother and the rest of its family.
• Cue the Rain: When Jane is alone in the jungle.
  Jane: It can't get any worse, can it?
  [thunder clashes, rain begins]
  Jane: Obviously, it can.
• Cutting Back to Reality: The animals have a musical number, but when Jane and Tarzan arrive all they see and hear is them trashing the campsite.
• Cynicism Catalyst: It's clear that Kerchak was left completely heartbroken by the loss of his child even worse than Kala was, and actively resents Tarzan's presence because he feels like Kala is trying to replace the child they lost.

D

• Daddy's Girl: Jane and her father are very close.
• Damsel in Distress: Jane at first. She's an example of that trope played right. She doesn't need to be saved because she's dumb or particularly weak, but because she's a Fish out of Water in a very dangerous environment in a time period when women weren't prepared by society for such situations.
• Dark Is Not Evil/Light Is Not Good: As explained in the directors' commentary, for the jungle scenes the usual symbolism is intentionally inverted—shadows represent shelter, thus safety, and light represents exposure, thus danger. Pay particular attention during the fight between Tarzan and Sabor.
• Destroy the Villain's Weapon: During his final battle against Clayton, Tarzan manages to get his hands on Clayton's gun. Clayton goads Tarzan to shoot him, sneering at him to be a man, but Tarzan destroys the gun instead.
• Disneyfication: The original novels were much more violent, as well as ethnocentric and overtly racist, all of which had to be slashed for the animated film. Also, in the novel, it was the much-more-savage Kerchak who was responsible for the deaths of Kala's infant and Tarzan's father, John Clayton Sr. (as Tarzan's mother, Alice Rutherford Clayton, died of natural causes). Thus, it's an example of a work being improved by this trope.
• Disney Villain Death: Downplayed. Clayton does fall from a great height, but he doesn't quite make it to the ground.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Jane is nearly killed by a troop of baboons, apparently because she refused to give a drawing to a baby baboon.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Professor Porter says this when he seemingly causes the entire ship to move just by punching the wall. Subverted as it's actually Tantor climbing aboard the ship.

E

• The Echoer: When Tarzan meets Jane for the first time, he repeats everything she says.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Tarzan not speak good English, since he's just now learning it, but in scenes where it's just Tarzan and the apes, he's shown to be a perfectly eloquent speaker of ape. He's even considered something of a notorious Deadpan Snarker, but hanging around Terk will do that to a guy.
• Emotion Suppression: Kerchak seems to have been much warmer and more loving in the past, but was clearly traumatized by his failure to protect his and Kala's baby from Sabor, and subsequently became a hardened, stoic leader obsessed with protecting his troop at all costs.
• Epic Tracking Shot: Visually, the film is gorgeous and used cutting-edge effects to follow Tarzan as he Le Parkour's through the jungle, in contrast to the simpler rope swings of previous adaptations. The animators based it on some of the more dynamic videos made for extreme sports.
• Establishing Character Moment: Tantor is first introduced standing at the edge of the water asking his mother if it's sanitary and about the bacteria in it, and then freaks out upon seeing Tarzan in the water.
• "Eureka!" Moment: There's a particularly poignant variant during the scene where Tarzan meets Jane after rescuing from the monkeys when he catches her hand as she tries to slap him, pulls her glove off and presses his own hand against hers. This is the moment that Tarzan realises that this strange creature with the baggy yellow fur and the high-pitched voice he'd just saved is actually the same as him.
• Everyone Has Standards: At first, Kerchak tells Kala not to keep the baby she found, because it's not a replacement for their child. Then she reveals that Sabor tried killing the baby, and murdered his parents. Kerchak's expression changes; he says the child can stay.

F

• Falling-in-Love Montage: "Strangers Like Me", in addition to having him slowly learn to be human, also gives him moments to spend quality time with Jane.
• Family-Unfriendly Death:
  • Sabor pounces on Kerchak and Kala's infant son and takes him away. Though not shown onscreen, the infant's pained shrieks can be heard as the leopard kills and devours him.
  • Clayton falls from a tree with a vine latched around his neck. Despite another Gory Discretion Shot, the silhouette of his hanging corpse is briefly seen due to a lightning strike.
• Feeling Your Heartbeat: When Kala tries to assure Tarzan that they're the same despite her being a gorilla and he a human, she has him listen to his own heartbeat and then hers. Later when Tarzan is an adult and meets Jane, he listens to her heartbeat and then has her feel his in an effort to connect.
• First-Name Basis: Tarzan always addresses Kerchak by name instead of "dad" or "father" unlike Kala. This is likely due to Kerchak not accepting him as a son while Kala did.
• Fish out of Water: Jane is a well-educated, independent, and reasonably brave young woman (especially for her time period), but she's out of her depths in the African rainforest.
• Flight of Romance: A variant appears briefly in the "Strangers Like Me" montage, when Tarzan teaches Jane the basics of vine-swinging.
• Flowers of Romance: Tarzan watches a slideshow that includes an image of a man giving flowers to a woman. He puts together that this is how the English propose to each other, so he goes about the jungle collecting flowers to make a bouquet for Jane. He accidentally bumps into her in the process, bursting the bouquet apart and leaving him with only two flowers, which oddly makes his request for Jane to stay even sadder.
• Flyaway Shot: The movie ends with the camera zooming back from Tarzan and Jane as he lets out his famous yell.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The first thing we see Tarzan do as a boy is to imitate an elephant call, and seconds later, he imitates a leopard too. The first of these foreshadows the scene where Terk dares him to retrieve an elephant hair, and the second foreshadows the scene where Tarzan fights Sabor as an adult.
  • Some of the scenes in the film that involve Clayton give away hints that foreshadow his true nature. The first scene is when he tells Porter that Tarzan might become their link to finding the gorillas with his sly smile. The second scene is when the humans are preparing to leave, Tarzan decides to lead them to the nesting grounds after Clayton tells him if Jane sees the gorillas, she'll stay with him forever, and when he calls for Clayton, he makes a sly grin as Tarzan begins to make his decision. When the humans are at the gorillas' nesting grounds, Clayton marks off the spot on the map where the music starts to turn ominous as he grins slyly.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The four main non-humans: Kerchak the no-nonsense and task-oriented choleric, Kala the emotional and thoughtful melancholic, Terk the extroverted and talkative sanguine, and Tantor the fretful but intelligent phlegmatic.

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