The Road to El Dorado Review

by Bradley Null (cnull AT mindspring DOT com)
April 2nd, 2000
filmcritic.com presents a review from staff member Bradley Null.
You can find the review with full credits at
http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/2a460f93626cd4678625624c007f2b46/bebb69b65e89ff94882568b20012269e?OpenDocument
THE ROAD TO EL DORADO
A film review by Bradley Null
Copyright 2000 Bradley Null

THE ROAD TO EL DORADO is DreamWorks’ second big attempt, after 1998’s
PRINCE OF EGYPT, to break into Disney’s monopoly on the animated film
business. It is an effort as disappointing as the first.

The one aspect of this film that fits squarely within genre conventions
is the subject matter. Like such classics as BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and
ALADDIN, EL DORADO finds a classical fantasy in the lost city of gold,
couching it in a historical context: In this case is the Spanish
explorer Cortez’s very real search for that mythical city.
Unfortunately though, Cortez is lost for the bulk of the film while we
are left to follow two roguish Spaniards (voiced by Kline and Branagh)
who stumble upon, in sequence, a map to El Dorado, Cortez’s ship to the
New World, and El Dorado itself. Once the two con artists find El
Dorado, they are of course hailed as Gods, and the bulk of the story
concerns just how they are going to carry out this charade and make off
with the gold back to Spain. In the process, we are left with a
half-hearted conniving native medicine man voiced by Armand Assante as
our only hope for a true villain. Once they find the lost city, the
plot follows turn for turn that of the 1975 Sean Connery vehicle, THE
MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. One could argue that plagiarizing a great film
is not such a bad idea, considering a great bulk of the audience has
never seen said film or read the book it is based on. Nonetheless, it
tends to irk any true movie fan to see great movies remade badly.

Plagiarizing the plot is not the only evidence of cutting corners found
in this film; the action sequences also seem for the most part to have
been cut down into action shots. Compared with TARZAN’s extensive and
breathtaking use of deep canvas (the effect of making animation look
three-dimensional), EL DORADO feels downright static, at least until the
final climactic action sequence. Likewise the dancing canvas we have
expected from musical numbers since FANTASIA are not only static, but
heavily infused with the fluorescent hues and musical bits from the
likes of YELLOW SUBMARINE.

Witnessing DreamWorks fumble around the animated film genre for the
second time, one might wonder if Jeffrey Katzenberg was not perhaps
boasting a bit when he claimed to be the genius behind Disney’s recent
success in the animated genre. You might wonder in fact if Katzenberg
took anything at all from his experiences at Disney. While Disney
continues to knock out quality animated fare in the tried and true
Disney tradition without Katzenberg (see 1999’s TARZAN and TOY STORY 2),
DreamWorks continues to stumble in this arena.

EL DORADO also follows in THE PRINCE OF EGYPT’s footsteps bucking genre
conventions by lassoing a PG rating. However, more risqué than PRINCE,
EL DORADO seems to claim its rating through a racy bit of sexual
innuendo between the roguish Spaniard Tulio (Kline) and the bad girl
native Chel (Perez).

I wouldn’t ordinarily paint myself as a fan of genre conventions or
brand names, but sitting down to see DreamWorks muck up the animated
film format, I found myself yearning for a Disney picture. Does Disney
just have the magic touch, or have they patented and contracted into
infinity all of the elements of good animation?

RATING: **1/2

|------------------------------|
\ ***** Perfection \
\ **** Good, memorable film \
    \ *** Average, hits and misses \
    \ ** Sub-par on many levels \
    \ * Unquestionably awful \
    |------------------------------|

MPAA Rating: PG

Director: Bibo Bergeron, Will Finn, Don Paul
Producer: Brooke Breton, Bonne Radford
Writer: Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio
Starring: voices of Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Rosie Perez, Armand
Assante, Edward James Olmos

--
Christopher Null - cnull@mindspring.com - http://www.filmcritic.com

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