El Dorado review

[David L. Frye]

A few weeks back the question came up of protesting or boycotting the new
cartoon movie "The Road to El Dorado." From the reviews I have seen so far
a boycott would hardly be worth the effort. Here is the review of the
movie by Stuart Klawans (in The Nation, April 24 edition):

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Somewhere there lives a boy who wants to grow up and join the
bus-and-truck tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. For that child, DreamWorks
has made the animated feature The Road to El Dorado.

Here's Miguel (voice of Kenneth Branagh), shoulder-length blond hair
parted in the middle, reddish beard trimmed neatly at all times, sashaying
into the South American jungle in a flowing outfit cut from the same
fabric as the soundtrack's Elton John songs. Is this 1519, as a title
proclaims, or 1973? If market research says that kiddie-film ticket-buyers
are mostly parents who are pushing 40, then you know the answer. It's time
to pump up the pop-rock and tell the animators to draw flared pants--the
kind that are favored by Tulio (voice of Kevin Kline), Miguel's bosom
companion, who pulls his dark hair back in a ponytail and wears a little
vest, as if he worked in a Buffalo Springfield cover band.

The story, copied in equal measure from Hope-Crosby Road movies and The
Man Who Would Be King, goes like this: Miguel and Tulio, a couple of
scuffling showbiz types (I mean, lovable Spanish rapscallions) come into
possession of a cryptic map to the City of Gold, El Dorado. Soon after,
they stumble into the hold of a ship full of conquistadors bound for the
New World. A brisk shipwreck later, Miguel and Tulio wash up in a place of
dense jungle and visual milange, composed of Olmec, Maya, Aztec and Disney
elements. Sure enough, our boys have found El Dorado. Now they can be
greeted as gods (in the time-honored fashion of white-men-meet-the-natives
movies), introduce democracy to Mesoamerica and bicker over the affections
of Chel (voice of Rosie Perez), the cartoon babe in the Dorothy Lamour
role.

Directed by Eric "Bibo" Bergeron and Don Paul, The Road to El Dorado
creates characters with the unmodeled, flat-plane features that uglify so
much of digital animation. As if to force expression into these figures,
the filmmakers have overcompensated by outfitting Miguel and Tulio with
broad white bands in their mouths--digital-animation dentures, you might
say--which are to be flashed at all times. Only the villain, the
priest-sorcerer Tzekel-Kan (voice of Armand Assante), has individual
teeth, a trait that makes him the film's most human-seeming figure, even
when done up in his jaguar-mask outfit.

If you are a pushing-40 parent who buys tickets to kiddie films, you may
take your charges to The Road to El Dorado in full confidence that they
will come away disapproving of human sacrifice. At least the early
seventies taught us that much.