Hands down, the best family movie this year!

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2000)

The Emperor's New Groove: Disney (not counting their Touchstone division) produces two kinds of movies: live family oriented films like "102 Dalmations" (although the quality is generally better) and animated musicals a la "Tarzan" or "Aladdin". Their most recent offering, though patterned on the latter, lacks the trademark songs and forays into morality, opting instead for an old fashioned cartoon. A gutsy move indeed.
Kuzco is a self centered spoiled brat, but when you're the 18 year old ruler of a South American country, that's not a stretch. When Kuzco fires Yzma, his "trusted" advisor and her behemoth helper Kronk, they decide to do away with him. Although they bungle the attempt on his life, they do succeed in turning him into a Llama. More troubling than being turned into a beast of burden is Kuzco's knowledge that he is at the mercy of the very peasant whose land he was about to appropriate for a summer home. Who ever said life is easy?
One of the qualities that I enjoyed most about "Iron Giant" was that the characters didn't keep breaking out into song - it's not that I don't enjoy musicals, but they can grow tiresome. I didn't know what to expect from this movie mainly because I knew they had changed the content several times, probably fearing a repeat of "Road to El Dorado's" bad box office. Radically altering the course of a film midstream generally leads to problems (does anyone remember "Supernova"?), and at the very least, I doubt Sting will ever offer to score another Disney film after they scrapped the bulk of his songs. Fortunately this break with the Disney convention works.

Although I'm not a huge David Spade fan, the combination of his skewed sarcastic humor and excellent animation is exactly what the emperor-turned- Llama calls for, making Kuzco a character we like, in spite of the fact that he is a shameless cad. On the other end of the spectrum is Pacha, voiced by Jon Goodman, the kind and caring peasant who is willing to help Kuzco although it may be to his detriment. Yzma, Kuzco's scheming right hand woman, is brought to life by Eartha Kitt's raspy voice and spot on animation (before you even hear her voice you know who the "actor" is), and is positively scary, but in a nice way. Finally, Kronk (Puddy from "Seinfeld" who incidentally will be starring in a live-action version of "The Tick" on FOX) the sidekick wanna-be, is hilarious as the double-digit-IQ-walking-slab-of-muscle more concerned with cooking than killing.
The combination of the sixties style animation, solid characters and slapstick style result in a movie that is pure, simple and unmitigated fun. Go!