What to Stream: Disney's Highly Rewatchable Buddy Comedy 'The Emperor's New Groove'
The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) Netflix, Amazon Instant, iTunes
The Basics: A vain emperor gets a crash course in humility when he’s transformed into a llama and embarks on a journey with a humble peasant to recover his stolen throne.
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Disney cartoons frequently go through multiple drafts on their way to the big screen, with beloved classics like Toy Story and recent hits like Big Hero 6 both experiencing radical transformations from their earliest versions to the finished products. But few of the studio’s animated features have been as radically overhauled as The Emperor’s New Groove. The film began its life in 1994 as Kingdom of the Sun, a South American riff on The Prince and the Pauper, that was to be directed by The Lion King's Roger Allers, and feature songs by Sting. That original concept was on shaky creative ground from the beginning, and after five years of behind-the-scenes battles, Disney disbanded the original creative team and enlisted director Mark Dindal and writer Chris Williams to take one more pass at the project. (The demise of Kingdom of the Sun is chronicled in the hard-to-find documentary The Sweatbox, co-directed by Sting’s wife, Trudie Styler, which played the Toronto Film Festival in 2002, but has never been released on any home-entertainment format.)
Ditching The Prince and the Pauper framework, Dindal and Williams instead turned the film into a rollicking buddy-comedy–meets–road movie, pairing David Spade’s royal jerk Emperor Kuzco with John Goodman’s good-natured farmer, Pacha. Like the best odd-couple comedy duos, it’s an unlikely, but successful match-up of personalities that gives the movie a strong comic foundation to build upon. As great as Spade and Goodman are together, they’re almost surpassed by the movie’s other stellar comedy team, the late Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton, who play buffoonish villains Yzma and Kronk respectively. (Warburton’s dunderheaded Kronk proved such a scene-stealer that Disney later commissioned Kronk’s New Groove, a direct-to-DVD sequel based entirely around his character.)
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Williams’ irreverent dialogue and Dindal’s elastic animation style owes more to vintage Looney Tunes shorts (and classic Simpsons episodes) than traditional Disney features, which may explain why the studio seemed uncertain how to market it upon its original theatrical release. Dropped into theaters with little fanfare in December, the movie earned a modest $90 million domestically, making it one of the studio’s lowest-grossing animated features. But Groove's short runtime, quick wit and high rewatchability factor makes it ideal for home viewing, where kids can crack up over the broad llama humor while their parents can laugh endlessly at the self-aware gags involving shoulder angels and levers. Sometimes major creative overhauls like the transformation of Kingdom of the Sun into The Emperor’s New Groove can leave you mourning the movie that never was. In this case, though, the movie we got is so much better.
Photo: Walt Disney Pictures
