Mark Dindal’s cartoon throws out the Broadway ballads and the weeping of late-nineties Disney and runs on jokes alone for 78 minutes. Most of them land. The lesson about friendship at the end is the one thing in it the film does not believe.
The Emperor’s New Groove opens on a llama sitting alone in the rain, sobbing, and the llama starts to talk. This, he tells us, is him: Kuzco (David Spade), emperor of a mountain kingdom, a young man who has an old woman thrown out of a window for spoiling his groove. Mark Dindal’s film then goes back to show how he ended up in the jungle, and it does so at a speed the studio’s features of the time rarely tried. There is one song, at the start. After that the usual Disney furniture, the ballads, the dead parent, the swelling chorus, is simply not in the film. It is a chase cartoon in the Warner Bros manner, and we mean that as praise.
The set-up takes about ten minutes. Kuzco sacks his adviser Yzma (Eartha Kitt) for sitting in his chair. He summons Pacha (John Goodman), a big, patient man from a village in the hills, to tell him that his home is coming down to make way for a summer palace with a slide. Yzma resolves to poison the emperor at dinner, her henchman Kronk (Patrick Warburton) fetches the wrong bottle, and the emperor turns into a llama in front of his soup. Kronk is told to finish the job, and does not, and the sack ends up on Pacha’s cart. From there it is two mismatched travellers trying to get back to the city, and David Reynolds’s script never lets them rest.
Kitt and Warburton are the film. Yzma is drawn as a coat hanger in purple eyeshadow, all elbows and cheekbones, and Kitt’s voice, which sounds like a gate that has not been oiled since the Incas, makes every line a threat and a joke at once. Kronk is a slab of a man with a baritone he delivers dead flat, whether he is plotting an assassination or worrying about his spinach puffs. He talks to squirrels. He has an angel and a devil on his shoulders who argue in front of him. We laughed out loud, in a way we rarely do at a family cartoon, at the devil’s closing argument, which involves a handstand and nothing else, and we laughed again at the theme tune Kronk hums to himself while creeping through the palace with a sack.
The drawing has been simplified to let all this move. Paul A. Felix’s production design takes the shapes of Incan stonework, the stepped blocks and trapezoid doorways, and tilts them, so that the palace looks like a building that has had one too many. The backgrounds are flat and plain, which is a choice, not a shortcut: the figures can rush in front of them without anything getting in the way. John Debney’s score is brass and bongos and big-band swing, and it hits the gags on the beat the way the old Looney Tunes scores did. Tom Finan and Pam Ziegenhagen cut every scene on the punchline and get out. The whole thing is 78 minutes and we could not name a stretch that drags.
Spade’s Kuzco is meant to be irritating, and he is, which is a risk the film mostly gets away with because Goodman is there to absorb it. Pacha is warm without being soft, and Goodman lets him lose his temper at the right moments. His wife Chicha (Wendie Malick), heavily pregnant and unimpressed by everything, and the children Chaca (Kellyann Kelso) and Tipo (Eli Russell Linnetz) give the film its one household, and the scenes there are quieter and better than we expected.
What the film cannot do is mean it. Kuzco is supposed to learn that other people exist, and the moment when he does is a couple of lines and a hug, hurried through because the film is embarrassed by it. The surrounding jokes have spent an hour teaching us not to take anything seriously, so when we were asked to, we did not. We admired the nerve of a Disney film that will not cry, and we felt nothing at the point where it wanted us to. The anachronisms, a roadside diner, a theme park, a bit of business with a waiter, are funny the first time and a little pleased with themselves the second.
Still, this is the studio remembering it can be silly. The decade before it had been stately musicals with big hearts and big choruses, and here is a cartoon that would rather do a squirrel joke than a sunset. Children will like the llama. Adults will find themselves quoting Kronk for years, and will not be able to explain why.
