Walt Disney, part LVII: His groove! The rhythm by which he lives his life, his pattern of behavior—I threw it off!

THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE

2000

Directed by Mark Dindal

Written by David Reynolds, Chris Williams, and Mark Dindal

Spoilers: moderate

The Disney Renaissance is a myth, and in some respects it's a fairly bad (or at least inconsistent) way to treat the periodization of Disney animation history.  "The Golden Age" and "the Silver Age" have their annoyingly self-regarding names, of course, but at least they refer (even if the Silver Age sometimes gets stretched) to a set of objectively-distinct industrial conditions under which Walt Disney's animation studio operated, and if I really could wave a magic wand, I might have everyone talk about "Ink-and-Paint, I-III," "Xerography," and "CAPS" eras instead.  By universal consensus, the Renaissance begins with The Little Mermaid, a movie made using Disney's most advanced xerographic system, APT; it is traditionally held to end with Tarzan, a movie digitally inked and painted in CAPS, while also introducing Disney's new 3-D background system, Deep Canvas, this exact mix of technology being used on four more (non-consecutive) movies despite the "Renaissance" having ended years before.  Yet it's a useful myth, which is why I've not ever attempted to seriously challenge the concept, for it describes a decade of output by Walt Disney Feature Animation where, almost objectively, they scarcely set a single foot wrong, doing more than any animation studio ever had before or since to establish animation as a legitimate artform (even if, simultaneously, they locked American feature animation into Disney's own "family cartoon" boundaries).  In the process, they earned for themselves enormous praise, and enormous profits (they also did more than anybody to establish family animated features as a commercially-viable genre, not solely "Disney movies"), and they produced a consistently-good, often-masterful body of work that spanned a length of time which had neither any precedent in theatrical animation (the very word "renaissance" implies a return to form, but no previous Disney period comes close to matching their persistence in the 90s), nor any recapitulation in the years after, even if around here you'll occasionally hear me use phrases like "the Second Disney Renaissance" or "the DreamWorks Renaissance."  If you hold that it did have a precedent, however, then I expect you could only be thinking of Warner Bros. short animation in the 40s and 50s, coming out of World War II with Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng as their leading lights; or of the animation of Tex Avery, who worked across several studios, but spun off from that same group.  Well, history can be funny that way.

There are many who would lengthen the Disney Renaissance by one more year, and I'd be one of them; that this isn't the consensus must have more to do, I think, with the imposition of Dinosaur into the chronology (which wasn't even made by WDFA, and there's no law forcing you to count it, just because Disney tells you to).  But I defy you to find me someone who doesn't like The Emperor's New Groove—a commercial underperformer, admittedly, but one that almost instantaneously repaired its reputation and became a classic.  Hell, even its underperformance could have as much to do with mere generational churn: let's say you were a young lad born in 1982 who really loved The Little Mermaid; what are your priorities going to be in the December of 2000?  Are you making positively sure you get out to the theaters for the new Disney cartoon, the one that looks like it's betrayed all the feints at adult seriousness made during the middle and end of the 1990s that had made it seem like WDFA might've even been growing up alongside its audience?  Are you presently scheduling your activities for winter break, keeping firmly in mind your absolute need to see the postmodernism-posioned Disney comedy cartoon about David Spade, the talking fucking llama?  Are you sure he doesn't rap, too?  (He doesn't, but he could have.)

So, yes, there are reasons why New Groove might be set apart.  It cannot be considered alongside the real failures that actually did destroy Disney's art form, yet it's obviously not of the same exact substance as the grand, mythic Disney of 1989-1999 either—even if, reduced to its barest description, it could sound like the same substance (wait, a selfish prince is turned into a pitiful beast by a jerk witch and learns a lesson in humility?  I believe I've seen that cartoon).  But in the late 90s, while WDFA certainly did understand themselves to be in the midst of something like a renaissance, they of course only had the vaguest of premonitions that they were also manufacturing its own conclusion, and, famously—infamously!—New Groove did not begin life as the belatedly-beloved zany lark it would become.  No, it was a film whose prime mover had every intention of extending Disney's cycle of princess musicals (albeit, ala Aladdin, with a male lead), and it didn't even begin life as The Emperor's New Groove, which, fairly enough, would've been a pretty glib and ill-fitting title back then.

Roger Allers called it Kingdom of the Sun, and in roughly 1994, he was given Kingdom to direct, all on his own.  This solo arrangement was hugely unusual for Disney, but in 1994, Allers could only have been perceived as Disney's great man, the co-director of no less than The Lion King itself, then the most successful cartoon ever made (nearly doubling the box office of the previous one, Aladdin).  Originally, everything else surrounding the central conceit I alluded to—"a selfish prince becomes a llama in pre-contact Peru"—was going to be different: the actual story was a Prince and the Pauper riff, providing that jerk witch her opportunity to usurp the throne through the pauper, whilst dispensing with that prince via llamafication; there were twin romances, where the prince fell in love with a simple llama herder following his escape, while the pauper hooked up with his lookalike's aristocratic betrothed, who'd found herself impressed by the sudden improvement of his personality; and it turned out the jerk witch's ultimate goal, in conjunction with the Andean devil, was to literally blot the sun from the sky, as she blamed its rays for the wrinkles of age.  Meanwhile, somewhat like Tarzan, it would be "a musical" only sometimes, for most the music would be on the non-diegetic original soundtrack by Phil Collins-adjacent adult contemporary pop artist Sting.  But let's back up to where I said "the villainess's goal is to destroy the sun, because her collagen is depleted," and ponder how sober-minded Allers's movie ever could've presented itself as, because that's just so... stupid.  I'm not even objecting to it on the grounds it's sexist (it sure sounds like it is, and I'm grateful that we haven't had to continually relitigate it for the past twenty-four years), but only that it's so ridiculously arch that I simply can't imagine a Disney movie in the 90s accommodating it for 80 or so minutes at the level of gauzy fabulism that it obviously would've required.

The best argument, I think, for not counting New Groove as the finale of Disney's Renaissance is that the death of Kingdom just presents such a perfect moment to declare it over.  Now, it's not true that none of the earlier Renaissance films had suffered production fiascos of similar magnitude, but New Groove was, initially at least, an embarrassment.  Kingdom's debacle was widely reported (and New Groove's commercial disappointment smugly reported), but one reason we do know so much about Kingdom of the Sun, despite Disney's preferred practice of sweeping failure under the rug, is that Sting's wife Trudie Styler ensured that Disney would allow her to make a documentary of her husband's experience doing the soundtrack, and even though they tried to bury it, it eventually seeped out through the cracks.  Styler's film acquired the name The Sweatbox, an ominous title (though it's just a reference to the once-non-air-conditioned screening room at WDFA), and the experience she sought to capture became a miserable one as Sting realized, inch-by-inch, that he'd been made redundant to his employer's process.  Still, the main interest of The Sweatbox, at least for us, isn't Sting (who, for the record, comes off very egotistical and, furthermore, whose songs for Kingdom sure seem to have sucked), but its documentation in real time of how WDFA's institutional guardrails all fell off.  I don't know if The Sweatbox might be framing him more negatively than he deserves, but Allers seems to have been flailing, having a desperately difficult time communicating what he wanted to anybody, including to non-Sting personnel, yet despite his flailing, expecting and getting all the deference in the world until it was almost too late, or, in fact, until it was too late.

Much of this is, even with The Sweatbox, interpretative.  I'm actually baffled by Disney's decision to make the documentary legendary, by way of their attempt to make it forbidden, because it's just not that scandalous.  It's not even particularly dramatic.  It mostly only confirms what was already well-known: Allers was spending a lot of Disney's money on a movie that wasn't coming together, and everyone knew it; the successive heads of WDFA during Kingdom's development, Peter Schneider and Thomas Schumacher, permitted the bleed until Michael Eisner heard that Kingdom might not even hit its release date, when lucrative tie-in deals had already been made; Allers was assigned a co-director, Mark Dindal, fresh off Warner Animation's unsuccessful-but-well-liked cartoon comedy, Cats Don't Dance, in part because the executives had gotten worried, due the severity and seriousness that Allers was allegedly putting into his movie about the woman who kills the sun to cure her crow's feet, that they might have another insufficiently-fun Pocahontas or Hunchback of Notre Dame on their hands (it is also at this point that Kingdom acquired a quippy sidekick, somehow yet another comic relief talking statue in a Disney movie, who thankfully disappeared before the movie actually got made); and, predictably, Allers and Dindal's opposite approaches tore the film in twain, so that, in the end, Allers gave up rather than compromise.

Dindal only barely managed to stave off Kingdom's execution, whereupon it began the rapid process of metamorphosing into something very different—The Emperor's New Groove—as well as a something congenial to being finished in about eighteen months, lest Eisner's wrath be felt.  The Sweatbox will deepen one's understanding of this history a little, but as far as I can tell, the only plausible reason it had to be suppressed was because the people who were most humiliated by it were Schneider and Schumacher, executives who apparently came into work every single day only to decide anew that it would be fine for Allers to continue wasting copious amounts of their firm's money on a project they didn't believe in, nor seem to have even been particularly aware of at any given moment, or even especially concerned about.  I guess it's sort of nice, in the sense that they respected their artist too much to stop him from making horrible mistakes (that is, until he'd demolished his career, so it's actually not that nice).  But you can perceive that Disney was, at last, getting sloppy—if you wished to attribute that to Jeffrey Katzenberg's absence, I might not stop you*—and, in general, Disney's sloppiness, and Disney's complacency, would persist right up until the sad day that animation, as we knew it, entered its era of terminal decline.

As for this movie, Dindal's instinct and strategy was to make it a full-on comedy, and with no countervailing pressure, that's exactly what he made, an even purer comedy than Cats Don't Dance had been, as that film had mixed comedy with much schmaltzy sentimentalizing and themes.  But it's clearly an aspect of the same personality that's shining through.  Cats Don't Dance is as indebted to the middle of the 20th century as any movie to be made in the last decade of it; its biggest influence is probably Singin' In the Rain.  But its second biggest is undeniably all those old Warners and MGM cartoons I mentioned, lo 2000 words of production history ago, and New Groove continues that work, adopting the attitude of the latter as completely as any Disney animated feature conceivably could, perhaps more than you could conceive.  There's still a story, with "heart," and it even works on its modest level, but there's not any other Disney feature (besides Sleeping Beauty, for very different reasons) where the movie cares less, or where it matters less, whether or not you actually give a shit.  And the idea that there could be a great Disney Renaissance film that's still great without you giving a shit is, I will concede, probably another good reason for it to be set apart.

It goes like this: in Tawantinsuyu, or the Inca Empire if you're not a history nerd, reigns the young god-king, Kuzco (Spade; and forgive me if I accidentally write "Cuzco," since it's the Peruvian city he's named after**), and Kuzco's a real asshole, as anyone might be if they were a god-king who rules unquestioned over an enormous empire, gets everything they want immediately, and even has their own Theme Song Guy to announce how cool they are every time they enter their palace (Tom Jones!).  Practically the first thing Kuzco does in this movie is have an old man tossed from a window for the capital crime of, get this, throwing off his groove.  Now, most of the movie's comedy isn't this violent, but these first few minutes have already established how this Disney movie is going to behave: for one, it will do things that are unexpected and rupturing, like having the hero throw old men to their presumptive doom—and in terms of comedy technique, that we don't learn that the old man survived (it is a Disney movie, after all) for another couple of minutes lets the shock laugh of Kuzco's tyrannical murderousness actually land—but while this relaxation of realism has sort of been given "Disney movie" permission by dint of occurring in or next to a musical number (the only one, sorry Sting), "realism" has already received a more-or-less fatal blow in the very first thing we get in these first few minutes, which is an in medias res opening of a miserable llama likely to die in the jungle narrated by Spade in a form that openly confirms "we're watching a movie," akin to a parody of Disney-style openings even if our narrator weren't so abrasive and self-obsessed.  It's something Disney comedy shorts had done back in the day, too, but I like to think of it as similar to how Tex Avery cartoons in particular would frequently begin with a sarcastic narrator, albeit not (to my knowledge) one who so explicitly perceived himself to be hip.  And when we do eventually catch up with this prologue, Kuzco, the onscreen llama, will tell Kuzco, the hip narrator, to shut his damn yap.

But to finish filling in the plot connecting these things: Kuzco's about to get his groove really thrown off, because he chooses this day to fire his chief advisor, also a sorceress, the ancient Yzma (Eartha Kitt, thereby concluding the core cast members who were even associated with Kingdom of the Sun), for attempting to run the empire behind his back.  In retaliation, however, she just decides to up and assassinate him, but thanks to the bumbling of her affably dumb evil henchman, Kronk (Patrick Warburton), instead of poisoning the emperor they've merely turned him into a llama.  This is still a significant enough disability that after they beat his head in and Yzma sends Kronk to throw him off a waterfall, Yzma is able to assume the imperial throne despite the fact that soft-hearted Kronk actually let him live, and the unconscious llama-king wound up hitching a ride in the cart of the peasant, Pacha (John Goodman), back to his rustic village.  (In a movie where, naturally, almost every single joke is bound to be stressed, I love that this one isn't stressed at all: despite his adversaries' transparent animosity and extreme incompetence, Kuzco does not figure out till the movie is very close to being completely over that he's been the victim of a coup.  The related joke that is stressed is that everybody else in the empire figured that out before him—they just don't care, because they never liked Kuzco in the first place.)  Well, Pacha, a loyal subject, would of course help his emperor regain his throne, and his human form, except Kuzco's kind of made an enemy of him, too, having threatened to destroy his village and scatter its inhabitants—for instance his pregnant wife (kind of quietly revolutionary, right?; Wendie Malick) and his two kids (Kellyann Kelso and Eli Russell Linnetz)—to the wind, because the hill they live on would be a pretty great spot for "Kuzcotopia," a summer home/personal water park.  Accordingly, Pacha helps him on the condition that he not destroy his home, and Pacha is naive and honorable enough to believe that this dickface is not going to have a moralizing peasant executed for the effrontery of demanding anything, and do what he wanted to do anyway.  Thus does the Mismatched Buddy Comedy ensue.

There's enough story here that I don't think you could accuse it of not having one, but it's interested principally in how the interaction of these four personalities prompts slapstick comedy setpieces and/or deadpan screwball comedy observational humor, frequently about the horrifying life-and-death stakes the slapstick comedy setpieces usually present.  There's an astonishingly forward-looking "let me guess, there is peril behind me" quip, involving a plummet down a waterfall, that is played with so much more verve than the same joke might be now that it's become a hidebound cliche; in either case, the deadpan parts are balanced by the equally-common parts that are just Spade's panicked mewling.  This is a really well-chosen cast for its purposes: Spade is so effortlessly insincere and annoying, and still usually very funny about continuing to live inside his infrequently-pierced royal bubble despite having been deposed; someone with Goodman's stolidity is necessary if we are to believe that Pacha doesn't just immediately slit Kuzco's throat, and he's a fine put-upon straight-man; Kitt's trilling voice is just terrific to listen to as she expresses constant disappointment at Yzma's megalomaniacal plans being upended by all these idiots, while also letting us know that, even if she's by far the smartest person in the ensemble, she's also an idiot; and good God, there's Warburton, known to us 90s sitcom fans from his guest spots on Seinfeld, and even moreso on NewsRadio, but striking out into "legend in his field" territory here as a voice actor, so that basically everybody's favorite from New Groove is Kronk's dim-witted, domestic-minded himbo who exists either beyond, or beneath, the concepts that you and I would call "good" and "evil."  (Even the angel and devil on his shoulders who sometimes appear don't seem to have more than the rudiments of a moral system themselves.)

So it's funny, we all know it's funny, and I shall try to not just point at the funny things, though given that the way it's funny is to be an A.D. 2000 version of what was funny circa 1950, doing so might be a little difficult, since those old cartoons were themselves mostly just scaffolding for gags.  Those who are fans of the Looney Tunes and associated comedy cartoons can readily tease out the significant differences between the varied temperaments of their biggest-deal creators, and while it would suffice it to say "this is like a Looney Tune," we can even do a little of that here: besides the dialogue, which is very much of the 1990s, we often have the fling-jokes-at-you strategy associated with Avery, as well as Avery's interest in breaking reality in ways that call attention to the artificiality of cartoons and motion picture storytelling devices in general—this kind of got disseminated to everybody making cartoons in the 40s and 50s, but Avery was the pioneer—and hence the prologue, as noted, and also what I expect is the most iconic gag in the whole thing, when the film takes recourse to using a map to denote a chase, except what's happening on the map is "really" happening, much to Yzma and Kronk's surprise when it turns out that the color-coded dotted lines representing the respective parties' paths are being literally painted out onto the territory beneath their feet; and, man, that elaboration where heroes express confusion about how the villains got ahead of them, and the villains thereby take a moment to re-check the map that is only supposed to exist as cinematic shorthand, only to find themselves equally confused, Kronk declaring that "by all accounts, it doesn't make sense," is, I'm pretty sure every person who's ever seen the movie must agree, the single funniest joke in the whole thing.

But then, there's the best setpiece, which is a whole lot more Jones, taking place in a planimetric canyon and driven by the weird physical challenge of the two heroes, back-to-back, required to climb up it, that's all about using the combination of the geometry of the landscape, the punishment of arrogance, and characters who see their dooms coming from miles away—i.e., all about "being a sort of Roadrunner cartoon, just with different dramatic goals"—to generate its laughs.  (There is also the climactic joke that's mainly a parody Disney villains falling off high precipices—due to the world's randomest trampoline, Yzma lives—but it's buttoned with a pristine "Coyote survives the fall only to bounce and smash his head on the overhanging rock" beat.)  As for that 90s dialogue, I should note that it's no more and possibly less anachronistic than most of its more "serious" predecessors at Disney—the anachronism is more a matter of attitude and being an avowed comedy makes it largely inoffensive, plus Spade's snide sarcasm is very rewarding—though I'll admit that some of the Looney Tunes-ier ideas about how to do anachronism are my least favorite things here: there's the 50s-ish diner in pre-Columbian Peru (where they eat... giant pillbugs?), and the Kronk-based farce about complicated special orders is much more successful than it has a right to be; but then, Kronk's revelation that he was, once, what amounts to a Boy Scout of America, including the uniform, sort of falls flat, bothering me on a level I can't articulate (possibly just because I've seen the vastly-worse DTV sequel, Kronk's New Groove, where it's a major plot element), even if it justifies a concept I enjoy a lot (Kronk is so simple and open-hearted he can speak to squirrels); and the forwarding of a latch bolt doorknob as an important part of a scene, that I'm going to pretend is made of copper, for whatever reason drives me insane.  I know I'm being stupid, but a version of New Groove that was just slightly less cavalier with its setting would, I think, be better.  And only very slightly.  Like, this is affirmatively good:

Altogether, though, what it feels like most to me is as if Freleng had somehow done a whole feature on the subject of a postmodern take on pre-Columbian Peruvians, partly due to how it's just this really well-paced, really well-built, but not-too-overthought gag machine (for that matter, the canyon sequence begins with some arch-Freleng, "two opponents locked into a single 2-D plane do comedic battle" construction), though a Freleng feature would probably have still been a musical.  But besides this nebulous vibe, it's just how it looks, for of all the major Warners directors, mid-career Freleng was the one most interested in stylized but still richly-rendered backgrounds.  This is, of course, even more the Disney of it, and while I've heretofore just been saying what everyone says about New Groove, I do think it's gotten incredibly short shrift as an outstanding work of visual artistry, just because it's pulling back on what it seems people expected of a "Disney Renaissance" film.  The brute truth, yes, is that it is a lot simpler, and to some degree this was imposed on Dindal by outside factors; it draws down hugely on the technological splendor, not just from where Disney was with Tarzan, but where they were in the mid-90s.  CGI is mostly out, and Deep Canvas altogether.  The increasingly-ambitious CAPS layouts are tamped down hard—arguably the most ambitious layout on display here is a joke about how frivolously grandiose the Z-axis CAPS camera movements had gotten lately, and I believe it relies more on old-fashioned cheats to effect its zany gag of a zoom-out, miles and miles away from the narrative-in-progress—and, accordingly, the aesthetic tends to cluster around a much smaller number of angles, and unusually square ones for a Disney movie (though not for a Warners short), and flatter staging.  I mean, it totally works; the goal is to present the comedy with perfect clarity and a certain uncluttered minimalism.

But the animation is actually excellent, if of course tilted towards far goofier ends, even when its excellence was designed to go unnoticed—I'll say, on that front, that Bruce W. Smith chose the exact right approach to supervising Pacha, giving him by far the most "Disney character" treatment, so that his credible physicality could serve as an anchor for all the nonsense swirling around him.  But Nik Ranieri and Dale Baer are providing the real pyrotechnics with Kuzco and Yzma, respectively, each sufficiently close to being the best-in-show that I'm not sure which one I like more: Ranieri had previously supervised Hades on Hercules, and I don't know if that's obvious, but there's something of Hades's fluidity to Kuzco, especially in the variable dimensions of his maniacal, squid-like eyes and his telescopic neck; whereas Yzma is just plain great, this parody of aged femininity (which Kitt's enormous energy counterbalances very well), and while it's probably ill-advised to say "wow, I love Yzma's extremely low, triangular breasts," they really do tie together her design.  If you prefer, I'll say instead that I enjoy the foot-long eyelashes that look like spider's legs.  (But then, one of the cooler, most adult-minded sub-currents ever put into any Disney movie has got be the slow-motion collapse of what's fairly clearly Yzma's sexual relationship with the newest in an endless line of her boytoys, due to their age gap of roughly 5000 years, plus Kronk's funny-to-us, annoying-to-her insipidity.  I'd probably declare it the most precious villain/henchman interaction in the whole Disney canon.)  As for Kronk, Tony Brancroft remembers that thanks to his mental infirmity he should constantly look like he's ten seconds away from wandering off into another perceptual dimension entirely, and, often enough, he does so.  There's a unifying angularity to the character designs, too, so much where Disney was heading after the experiments of the mid-90s that it wasn't really experimental anymore, but the same fluidity is there; and Yzma is so lankily angular she's like some delightful combination of Jones et al's late 50s acute modernism and a contemporary Burtonesque.  (The film's single biggest visual disappointment is that, the very moment that all those striking red-and-blue-painted palace guards finally get something action-oriented to do, Yzma's potions turn them into boring animals instead.)

Of course, what I mean most of all when I say it hasn't gotten full credit for looking great is those backgrounds.  Layout aside, if all you had to go on was Paul Felix's production design, I don't think you'd guess for a second that New Groove was operating at any seriously reduced level of ambition:

I suspect that the typical resort to calling the movie "like Chuck Jones" is just that Jones's signature series set in the American West is also presented against a backdrop of tectonic uplift, and this is some amazing storybook Inca Empire, from the mountaintop capital that's such a sleek wonder of stone and gold and monumentalism and water features that I almost wish we spent more time there, to the Andean hillsides just jutting up out of unplumbed abysses every which way you turn.  I love everything about the urban and wilderness settings here (I love how Kronk's extremely top-heavy shape was clearly made in contemplation of him prancing down the city's nearly upright stairs), and they offer up some of the more memorable visuals Disney ever got up to during whatever era we decided this is actually in.  There's a magnificence here that wasn't even strictly necessary: it imposes a level of thrilling epicness onto the proceedings whether the proceedings want it or not, even when all the movie absolutely requires from its visuals is that its audience laughs often enough at the funny llama man or the old crone getting hurt.

Score: 9/10

*The Road To El Dorado didn't have these problems.  Or rather, it had exactly these problems, which Katzenberg solved in due course and with less pain.

**Originally named Manco—after the semi-legendary Quechua king and unofficial first sapa inca—Disney "had" to scramble for a new name, because "Manco" is kind of close to the Japanese word for "cunt."  I understand finding this funny, but I find it pretty much just lame.