Emperors new groove john goodman
Because of this, he has plenty of enemies but few friends. When he is accidentally turned into a llama by a former employee, he strikes up a friendship with a common man named Pacha, voiced by John Goodman. The most interesting thing about the film, however, is not the plot, but the story behind the making of it. Tonally, it would have been a more serious film, an epic on the scale of The Lion King and followed an emperor as he is taught by a common man what it is to be good. At the time, the film was to be a musical for which Sting wrote several completed songs. The Sweatbox takes viewers behind the scenes of this often problematic project and gives us a sense of what the film could have been.
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Emperor’s New Groove, The (film)
Toggle navigation Menu. I'm skipping ahead. The actual entry at No. Anyway, since the proximate reason I embarked on this massive Disney retrospective was their return to hand-drawn animated features after a five-year gap with The Princess and the Frog , I felt justified in skipping the four CG features that were, after all, made by an entirely different creative team.
I may perhaps revisit them at some point. For right now, though, we're moving ahead to December, , for the first Disney animated feature since Aladdin , eight years earlier, with a fourth-quarter release date. Titled The Emperor's New Groove , it is a fairly silly, zany comedy with arguably the most minimalist style of any Disney feature since some of the package film shorts way back in the s, for partially similar reasons: it had to be put together fairly quickly.
It has the personal significance of being the first traditionally animated Disney feature that I did not see in a theatre; not because I thought it looked particularly bad but because that winter was during freshman year of college, and I was sufficiently stressed-out and busy that it just seemed easier to wait and catch up with it later, especially since it didn't seem all that exciting or visually spectacular.
What I missed out on for a year or better was a deliciously funny comedy better than any of Disney's other efforts in that vein, a film more indebted to the mentality of Chuck Jones than Walt Disney but all the better for being the studio's all-time most successful effort to do something different with their aesthetic, to reach beyond the simple limits of what we tend to call "Disney cinema".
Bizarrely, this lightest and wackiest of all Disney features was born from the most strenuous, vituperative pre-production experience of any of their films since The Black Cauldron in - and what better proof need we that the Disney Renaissance had crashed to its end than a return to miserable development hell, after so many films of relatively smooth, elegant production histories? The Emperor's New Groove had its roots in a project called Kingdom of the Sun , which was being developed by producer Randy Fullmer an effects animator by trade and director Roger Allers as early as , as the follow-up to the smash hit The Lion King , which Allers had co-directed.
Kingdom of the Sun was going to follow closely in that film's footsteps: an epic comedy-drama with a splashy musical soundtrack composed by a major pop icon, Sting in this case, and a narrative loosely re-worked from a familiar literary source: Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. Set in the Incan empire, it told of a spoiled youthful ruler, Manco voiced by David Spade, who swapped places with a llama herder, Pacha Owen Wilson , only to have the vengeful court witch Yzma Eartha Kitt turn the prince into a llama, and blackmail the llama herder into doing her bidding or she will reveal the whole plot and blame him for doing away with the emperor.
Yzma's scheme involves darkening the earth, as she blames the sun for giving her wrinkles, and she wishes to regain her old beauty. By late it had gotten fairly far along in the animation process, with millions of dollars spent along the way, when the Disney executives started to worry: Kingdom of the Sun didn't seem to be working, and Allers didn't seem to care.
The plot was awfully familiar and unengaging, the actors didn't seem terribly well-suited to singing Sting's songs, and all in all it just seemed like a boring mess. Allers was at this point one of the all-time golden boys at Disney - he'd turned a middling Hamlet knock-off around, fixing that film's rather dull story, and made it the highest-grossing cartoon of all time, after all - and the executives made the nearly fatal mistake of staying away from the project for too long, assuming that he'd bring some of that Lion King spark to the new project; but it just wasn't happening, and it was becoming increasingly clear that Kingdom of the Sun wasn't going to be ready for the summer release date that Disney had been planning on.
And even if it was, the executives had little faith that it was going to be a crowd-pleaser, especially since The Hunchback of Notre Dame had just followed Pocahontas as the second "serious" Disney film in a row to significantly under-perform at the box office. Something had to be fixed, immediately. The first step was to assign Allers a co-director, in the form of Mark Dindal. Dindal had been with Disney as an effects animator for years, and had worked closely with both Allers and Fullmer on other projects; but that wasn't his chief qualification.
Oddly enough, it was some work he'd just completed with Warner Bros. This fix didn't take, largely because Dindal and Allers seemed to be working on two completely different projects: Allers was still making the same Kingdom of the Sun that he always been, while Dindal's footage was poppy, zany, and most importantly - way more popular with test audiences.
Late in , an executive who has never been publicly identified, though I'd bet money it was Michael Eisner or maybe Peter Schneider, told Randy Fullmer that Kingdom of the Sun was "this close" - finger and thumb a half-inch apart - from being shut down. Then came the soul-searching: Fullmer had to communicate to Allers the company's extreme terror for the direction the project was going, and the lack of speed with which it was going there.
Allers was shocked and hurt, and rather than compromise his vision for the sake of release dates and a perceived lack of box office potential, he asked to be taken off of the project. With him went several important animators, furious at the company and proud to stick by the captain of their sinking ship.
Eisner was furious, and ready to write off the tens of millions of dollars already invested in the project, if Fullmer couldn't prove, in two weeks, that there was still a releasable movie to be made here.
So the producer grabbed Dindal, told him what was going on, and the two spent a feverish two weeks coming up with the pitch, starting by scrapping the Prince and the Pauper angle. Manco renamed Kuzco and Yzma both worked, but they were both total assholes, so the movie needed a sweet character for the audience to identify with.
Thus was Pacha turned into a roly-poly husband and father, and Yzma given a well-meaning, muscular, dumb-as-a-rock bodyguard named Kronk. The Sting songs were too serious and artsy and the actors couldn't sing them - out they go the particulars of that, and how badly it disappointed the songwriter, was documented in The Sweatbox , directed by Sting's wife, Trudie Styler. Any trace of artistry and seriousness was tossed out for comedy and hijinks.
Eisner very begrudgingly okayed this new direction, as long as Fullmer and Dindal could still get it out for the release date, a scant 18 months away. This was an obvious impossibility, but the only extension they were able to finagle was for an extra few months: the newly re-titled The Emperor's New Groove would get Dinosaur 's Christmas slot, but that was the best that Eisner could or would do.
Inspired by desperation, Dindal - now serving as sole director, the first man with such a privilege since Wolfgang Reitherman in the s - oversaw the simplest movie ever released by Disney Feature Animation, with a marked de-emphasis on detail or particularly involved backgrounds. It is also, and I do not think it likely that this is a coincidence, the most outright fun of them; there is nothing lazier than comparing funny animation to the Looney Tunes in the '50s, but damned if I can come up with a better thing to say about The Emperor's New Groove than that it appears that Bugs Bunny found his way into a film with Disney character animation.
Which I know is what I said about Hercules , but that's just the way of it: in a lot of different ways, from the stylised character design to the altogether contemporary mood of the humor to the bright, flashy colors, the feels in a great many ways like a dry run for the much more successful Emperor , despite the fact that there wasn't very much overlap between the two projects' crews: only Nik Ranieri served as supervising animator on both overseeing Hades in the first film, and Kuzco, both as human and as a llama, here.
When the dust had all settled, here's what the new story looks like: the day before his 18th birthday, the monstrously self-absorbed Emperor Kuzco still David Spade informs the placid llama herder and village elder Pacha John Goodman that the latter's quiet mountain home is about to be replaced by Kuzcotopia, a massive gilded summer home and water park.
He also sees fit to fire his extremely ancient advisor, Yzma still Eartha Kitt , largely because she keeps trying to run the country behind his back. Where Pacha takes his lumps with nothing but depression and sorrow, Yzma decides to be a bit more active: she has Kronk Patrick Warburton poison Kuzco with what proves to be essence of llama, turning the boy king into a talking animal; the back-up plan is for Kronk to dump Kuzco into the river.
He suffers a crisis of conscience, and in short order Kuzco ends up on Pacha's cart, thus beginning a journey back to the capital, with Pacha aiding the llama-emperor despite realising that Kuzco is a world-class jerk that nobody likes. Meanwhile, Yzma and Kronk are in the same jungle, looking for the missing llama, to make sure that he never comes back to trouble her new reign.
I dislike anachronistic modern humor in animation just about as much as anyone - have I mentioned that? It all comes back to that intensely simple visual style: even more than Hercules , this film is such a flat-out cartoon that its humor has a certain rightness.
It is frankly immature and silly, though those things do not imply nor require that it accordingly childish, and compared to so many of the comic animated films that followed, one never senses that Emperor is being pitched to the cheap seats just to make sure the tykes are entertained for a start, it has not a single fart or poop joke, the banes of modern children's comedy; even the achingly sincere and prestigious Hunchback of Notre Dame can't make the same claim.
Instead, it has a kind of balls-out screwball foolishness, humor drawn out of a very adult approach to being completely stupid. Take this line, delivered by the impeccably dense Kronk when a flickering light-bulb finally turns on and he clues in to Yzma's plan: "Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco's poison. That poison? Warburton gets my best-in-show honors it seems certain that his stellar work here led to his being cast in the career-peak role of Brock Sampson on the fantastic Adult Swim series The Venture Bros.
But as I was saying, the whole movie is full of moments like that: too squirrelly to be be rightly called "dry humor", and too dry to be completely absurd.
Whatever kind of humor it is, I for one think it works outstandingly well, and though I know certain segments of the Disney faithful have ever been turned off by the film's hyper-modernist sensibility, for me it is an unmitigated delight. I mean, it's not like the film has to sacrifice any of the customary Disney quality to get where it's going: this animation is as fantastic as ever, even if it lacks the painterly richness of some of the more readily-canonised Disney features.
I particularly enjoy the harsh angles of the character design, which emphasises the characters' "drawn" quality while not making them look so sketchy and chintzy as the xerography-enforced style of the s and '70s at the studio; it is a playful, sassy look that matches the zany screenplay rather nicely. She'd have been right at home in any given Chuck Jones short that's twice I've said his name, but he seems to me the key reference point in talking about this film's particular approach to animated comedy , with her big, unsubtle eyes and twitchy movements.
Bless Disney and their decades-long tradition of quality, but it's never a criticism to say that something reminds you of Chuck Jones. Having a single director on the project, especially one given such an unusual level of control by a company eager to have anything useful made as quickly as possible, proved to be a great benefit to Emperor , for Dindal proved to have outstanding comic timing, and the film has as much distinct personality as any other Disney feature for several years in either direction: the safe, buffered edges that seem to have been the result of careful corporate oversight and a too-protective approach to the brand name is nowhere to be found in this movie.
Again, I think it all comes down to desperation: Eisner had written this project off and moved his attention to the much more prestigious movies coming down the pike, leaving Dindal and Fullmer with an unusually free hand to pursue an end result that simply doesn't fit in right between Tarzan and Fantasia on the one hand, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire on the other.
It lacks any of the stuffiness that can be found in even the most outstanding of the company's Renaissance-era masterpieces, finding success in being quippy and hip and full of coy little jokes about that same stuffiness I love that Yzma's near-demise is such a pissy little parody of the tendency of Disney villains to fall from great heights.
Clearly, this is not what Disney was looking for, nor did audiences have much use for it, but to my eyes this the freshest and boldest experiment in Disney feature animation's history: an attempt to chase all the way to completion a different kind of aesthetic and attitude that had only made token appearances in some of the studio's films up to that point, but never defined a single project to this degree. They'd make one last stab in this direction before the whole damn studio folded, and it was nowhere near so effective; but at least we'll always have The Emperor's New Groove , the single outstandingly snotty, anarchic exception to the carefully-regimented perfection that led so many people to declaim Disney, rightly or wrongly, as hopelessly conservative.
I don't agree with that conclusion about the studio, but I still appreciate the gasp of fresh air that this amazingly unserious comedy represented in what would shortly reveal itself as the death spasm of a once-proud Hollywood institution. Categories: animation , comedies , disney , movies allegedly for children , sassy talking animals.
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The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
Many times, it is possible to make a snap determination about a movie based on its trailer. Happily, in the case of The Emperor's New Groove , any such judgment is likely to be in error. That's because the trailer makes the movie seem like one of the worst excuses for animated entertainment to come along in the past decade. However, while The Emperor's New Groove isn't going to challenge Beauty and the Beast , Aladdin , or The Lion King as the best of the "new wave" Disney animated features, it represents an entertaining if inconsequential 75 minutes spent in a theater. It's short and sweet - two adjectives I have not been able to use much this holiday season. The first, Fantasia , was the long-awaited, all-musical sequel to the classic Fantasia. It was designed for IMAX distribution although it eventually received a normal theatrical run.
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Most Disney animated films are timeliness affairs. If you ever just want to unwind and fill your brain with whimsy and magic, Disney is your go-to for entertainment. Yet some of their movies are overlooked. Nearly all of their films from the s are underrepresented and barely get mentioned.
The Emperor’s New Groove is the best 2000s Disney movie
A very arrogant guy. He's snide, spoiled, and sarcastic. And boy, does he love it! He's used to getting anything that he wants, and what he wants right now, is to build his Kuzcotopia on a kind-hearted peasant, Pacha's John Goodman hilltop. This, of course, upsets Pacha. He tries reasoning with the spoiled little boy-king, but Kuzco merely has guards restrain him and in the words of Kuzco "When I give the word
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Based on 14 reviews. Based on 49 reviews. Common Sense is a nonprofit organization. Your purchase helps us remain independent and ad-free. Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media.
The Emperor's New Groove
It is the 40th animated Disney feature film and was directed by Mark Dindal from a script written by David Reynolds, based on a story by Chris Williams and Dindal. The Emperor's New Groove follows a young and self-centered Incan emperor, Kuzco , who is transformed into a llama by his ex-advisor, Yzma. In order for the emperor to change back into a human, he trusts a village leader, Pacha , who escorts him back to the palace.
20 Weeks of Disney Animation: ‘The Emperor’s New Groove’
In , Disney seemed like it could do no wrong. Seemingly a recipe for success… so what went wrong? It was the first Disney film to look down the barrel of the lens and wink at the audience, sending up the tropes that even every Disney-phile was sick of by After Sting was brought on board to crank out the tunes, his wife, actor and director Trudie Styler, began to film the artists at work. Simple… right? We were robbed.
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