Mark Dindal makes cartoons that would rather get a laugh than a tear, and in The Emperor's New Groove that instinct gave Disney one of its leanest and funniest features. Most critics have been cooler on everything he has made since.
Fi1m perspective
A llama sits alone in the rain, sobbing, and then it starts to talk. That is how The Emperor's New Groove (2000) opens, and it is the whole of Mark Dindal's method in one shot: take the misery seriously for about four seconds, then puncture it. The llama is Kuzco, voiced by David Spade, an emperor who has an old woman thrown out of a window for spoiling his groove. There is one song, at the start, and after that no ballads, no dead parent, no swelling chorus; the film is a chase cartoon in the Warner Bros manner and it is done in 78 minutes. We laughed at that opening before we had worked out why, and the reason is the cut, straight from wet self-pity to a voice complaining about it, with no music to tell us how to feel.
Dindal came up through the machinery rather than the front door. He joined Walt Disney Feature Animation as an effects animator in 1980, after CalArts, and worked on The Little Mermaid (1989) among others. His first feature as director was Cats Don't Dance (1997), for Warner Bros. Animation, on which he also worked on story, character design and storyboards and voiced a part himself. Then Disney took him back, and the film that became The Emperor's New Groove began life as a troubled epic musical. "We decided we weren't having any fun," he said at the time, and the fun is what he kept. He made Chicken Little (2005), the studio's first computer-animated feature under his direction, left Disney in 2006, and returned in 2024 with a Garfield film for Alcon and Sony.
What he does well is speed. He restructures a story quickly, he times a gag, and he gets a cast of voices to talk over one another without losing a line. Randy Fullmer produced two of his films and David Reynolds wrote on two, and the Disney pair share a looseness that the studio's features of that period rarely allowed. What he does less well is the bit he is apparently most interested in. He has said his cartoons carry an emotional arc under the absurdity, and in Groove the lesson about friendship at the end is the one thing the film does not believe. The jokes are honest; the hug is contractual.
Most critics have found the later features mixed at best, and having seen only the one we would not argue the point either way. He is still working. On the evidence of the film we know, the question for the next one is whether anyone lets him throw the songs out again.
Biography
Mark Dindal is an American animator, director and writer. He trained at CalArts and began his career as an effects animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation, contributing to films including The Little Mermaid (1989) and Aladdin (1992).
Dindal made his feature directorial debut with Cats Don't Dance (1997). He directed and co-wrote the story for The Emperor's New Groove (2000), and later directed Chicken Little (2005) and The Garfield Movie (2024). He also created the Disney television series The Emperor's New School (2006–2008).
