Some movies you remember for the story. Some you remember for a single sound — a drumbeat, a voice, a song that lodged itself in your chest when you were a kid and never quite left.
Disney’s Tarzan, released in theaters in June 1999, is both. More than a quarter of a century later, the animation still soars — but it’s the music, by the legendary Phil Collins, that people keep coming back to.
A jungle classic, 27 years on
Directed by Chris Buck (in his directorial debut) and Kevin Lima, Tarzan brought Edgar Rice Burroughs’ century-old jungle hero to animated life with some of the most fluid, thrilling movement Disney had ever produced — Tarzan “surfing” through the treetops still looks spectacular today.
It was a genuine hit, too. On a budget of around $130 million, the film reportedly grossed about $448 million worldwide, making it one of the biggest releases of 1999 and the second highest-grossing animated film of the year, behind only Toy Story 2. It’s widely regarded as one of the high points that closed out Disney’s celebrated “Renaissance” era.
But ask people what they remember most, and the answer is almost always the same: the songs.
The soundtrack that broke the Disney rules
Here’s what made Tarzan so different. For decades, the Disney formula was the Broadway-style musical — characters stopping the action to sing their feelings directly to the audience.
Tarzan did something else. Phil Collins wrote and performed the songs himself, as a kind of emotional narrator — a voice coming from outside the characters, scoring their inner lives rather than putting words in their mouths. Paired with Mark Mancina’s instrumental score, tracks like “Two Worlds,” “Son of Man” and “Strangers Like Me” drove the story forward like a pop-rock pulse, swelling under the animation instead of interrupting it.
It wasn’t characters bursting into song. It was Phil Collins singing the movie’s heart out loud — and audiences had never quite heard Disney do that before.
And at the center of it all was a lullaby.
“You’ll Be in My Heart” — and an Oscar
“You’ll Be in My Heart,” the tender promise sung as the gorilla Kala takes in an orphaned human child, became the film’s signature. It’s a song about chosen family, about love that crosses every difference — and it struck a nerve far beyond the theater.
It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 2000 Oscars, along with a Golden Globe. For an entire generation, it remains one of those songs that can bring tears in the first three notes.
More than nostalgia
It’s tempting to file Tarzan under “childhood nostalgia” and leave it there. But the soundtrack’s reputation isn’t just rose-tinted memory.
Collins’s work here helped redefine what a Disney score could sound like, and it launched a creative relationship that would continue — he’d later bring his voice to Disney’s Brother Bear. The Tarzan songs have been covered, re-recorded in multiple languages (Collins famously performed them in several), and streamed by people who weren’t even born when the film came out. That’s not nostalgia. That’s staying power.
Why it still hits
Maybe it endures because the music does what the best film songs do: it carries a feeling you can’t quite put into words. The ache of not belonging. The thrill of finding where you do. The fierce, quiet love of family — by blood or otherwise.
Twenty-seven years on, the animation is beautiful, the story still works, and that voice still rises out of the jungle and grabs something deep in you. Not many soundtracks can say that.
So here’s the real question: all these years later, which Tarzan song still stops you in your tracks — and takes you straight back?