The 1990s saw a new era of American animation on screens big and small. Anime emerged from the shadows of cult status to become a mainstream fascination with English-speaking audiences. Nickelodeon made kids’ cartoons cool. The Simpsons reinvented the sitcom. Throughout the decade, the Walt Disney Company reasserted its status as the indomitable king of the medium after many years in the critical and commercial wilderness following Uncle Walt’s death. The much-vaunted Disney Renaissance saw the studio create some of its finest hand-drawn works, largely inspired by classic fairy-tales and traditional musicals of the golden age. As a new millennium approached, the company entered a new era, eager to keep the gravy train going while distancing themselves from the tropes that were becoming old hat. The Renaissance concluded with a sign of things to come, for better or worse, but it was a profane satire about eight-year-old kids that helped to hammer that first nail into the coffin.
Disney’s Tarzan was released on June 18, 1999, intended to be the company’s big Summer hit. A fortnight later saw the release of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the first feature film based on the popular yet highly controversial animated comedy. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had been at the center of the culture war long before it was ever called that thanks to their endless willingness to piss off anyone and everyone for no other reason than it amused them to do so. The show had barely been on the air for two years when Bigger, Longer & Uncut was released, but they’d already made headlines and shocked concerned parents worldwide with episodes featuring circumcision, Charles Manson, anal probing, and multiple violent deaths for poor Kenny. The movie promised to be R-rated and to go even further than even Comedy Central would let them. Audiences got what they wanted, but what they didn’t expect was for the movie to be a musical.
Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a surprisingly faithful old-school Disney-style musical, complete with the “pretty little town” song, the “I want” number, and a rousing cry to battle sung by a child with a voice uncannily similar to Liza Minnelli’s. For any cheeky kid sneaking into the theater who had grown up with The Little Mermaid and Beauty And The Beast, all of this felt startlingly familiar. It’s no surprise now, to audiences of The Book Of Mormon, that Parker and Stone are musical theater nerds, but the idea of the guys who made Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo being like the petulant nephews of Alan Menken was even more hilarious than watching Satan get railed by Saddam Hussein.
It was all the funnier because, over at the House of Mouse, Disney was trying to move away from that musical formula. It had diminishing returns with titles like Hercules, where the admittedly catchy songs felt ill-fitting for the wider narrative. They’d bandied about the idea of a Tarzan adaptation for several years before greenlighting it and handing the project over to Kevin Lima and Chris Buck. Tarzan was a way for Disney to expand into a slightly older audience (think pre-teens instead of seven-year-olds) and experiment with emerging animation technology. But it still had to be a Disney movie, which meant a lot of talking animals, one big bad guy to root against, and songs. Instead of those expected musical set-pieces, however, the numbers would be provided by Phil Collins and act like pop background numbers. He was Disney’s Diane Warren.
Tarzan is certainly a visual feast, particularly when compared to the deliberate crudeness of South Park’s paper cut-out style where characters bop around rather than move their legs. Tarzan surfs through the trees like Tony Hawk without wheels, moving through a blend of 3D backgrounds styled like oil paintings and hand-drawn detailing. There’s a lushness to the film that makes it unique among its Renaissance contemporaries. It’s easy to watch Tarzan and feel as though this was the next step for Disney’s continued domination of American animation. This wasn’t the Disney that Parker and Stone were so viciously parodying (albeit with proper toe-tapping numbers.)
The old-fashioned qualities of Tarzan presented a sharp opposition to Bigger, Longer & Uncut, a film that is more 1999 than The Matrix, Prince’s song, and Y2K-phobia combined. Taking those now-calcified Disney tropes and twisting their earnestness into pure Gen X snark only made them seem more archaic. The sincerity of Ariel singing about wanting to be where the people are cannot help but curdle when it’s sung by the Devil. But Disney wasn’t even Parker and Stone’s biggest target: That honor belonged to the MPAA.
In Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the kids go to see the long-awaited Terrance and Phillip movie, Asses Of Fire. The extremely profane movie has the town’s youths swearing up a storm, so of course their parents only have one way to retaliate: Go to war with Canada. Swearing is the most horrific act one can imagine in South Park, at least for the adults with access to guns. Parker and Stone claimed that the MPAA threatened to give the film an NC-17 rating after various early screenings, and only relented with an R when producer Scott Rudin intervened. They also said that they’d been told that if the script exceeded 400 swear words, the movie would be given an NC-17. Bigger, Longer & Uncut has 399.
Two months before the South Park film’s release, the Columbine massacre happened, and politicians attacked various youth culture favorites (like the show) as being somehow responsible for the murders. It felt all the more ironic given that the movie is about scapegoating silly distractions in lieu of pushing for trickier systemic change. It’s delivered with all the petulance and nothing-really-matters coolness that still defines the series, but it does hint at a widely accepted norm of American pop culture: Disney can kill off as many villains as it wants, and in various horrifying ways, as long as nobody says naughty language. Tarzan’s big baddie dies by hanging, and only showing his limp form in silhouette doesn’t soften it. It just makes it easier to show to kids. It’s not like they’re saying the F-word.
Both Tarzan and Bigger, Longer & Uncut were box office hits, although it was the former that became the major smash. The pair faced off against one another at the Oscars in the Best Original Song category, where Phil Collins emerged victorious and gave Parker and Stone fuel for another parody. Yet Tarzan didn’t bolster Disney’s animation studio for the new millennium. Indeed, their fortunes faltered with flops like Treasure Planet and Chicken Little, and the more they tried to reinvent their formula, the less audiences liked it. As Pixar took over and DreamWorks emerged, with the latter taking endless potshots at Disney through films like Shrek, Disney fell far behind until they abandoned hand-drawn animation altogether. They climbed back to the top, but largely through returning to the ‘90s pre-Tarzan style. Nostalgia beats innovation.
South Park, meanwhile, endures, having retained a startling level of consistency over the past 30 or so years. The series is 26 seasons strong, plus a variety of Paramount+ movie specials, some acclaimed video games, and millions of dollars of merchandising. Thanks to its speedy production schedule, it’s been able to keep up with current events faster than almost any other show on TV, and it continues to create discourse, even as Parker and Stone have evolved into the semi-respectable first gentlemen of snark. They’re unlikely to do battle at the box office with Disney any time soon, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they took said fight very seriously (but not at all.)