what has happened to Disney's movies!?

Rating: Null/10 (19 July 2001)

THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE was a big hit-and-miss to me. At only 77 minutes, it was too long. Perhaps if the story had had a quicker pace and funnier jokes, it would have seemed to go by quicker. As it is, it had only one or two really good jokes about every ten or fifteen minutes, and the space in-between them just seemed to drag and drag. I found myself laughing the most during the climax, when Yzma (expertly-voiced by Eartha Kitt) is turned into a cat and attempts to steal the potion that will turn Kuzco back into a human, and only occasionally throughout the rest of the film. The characters were well-cast (particularly Kitt, John Goodman, Patrick Warburton, and Wendie Malick), but David Spade got rather annoying after awhile. There were also (thankfully) no songs, with the exception being the opening sequence, featuring a funny little character that sings the opening song, voiced by Tom Jones.
I wish Disney could back to making the kind of animated movies they used to do, like THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER (still my favorite animated Disney movie), ROBIN HOOD, LITTLE MERMAID, and the other classics. Heck, even BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was better than this one. (MULAN and A BUG'S LIFE are the only recent animated Disney films I liked.) Maybe the film would have been better had the studio stuck with the original story (and partially already produced film), which from what I understand was a more serious film. Little kids will like the comical situations, but probably won't have the attention span to sit through the whole thing, while adults will like some of the jokes and feel the movie has already been on two hours by the time it gets thirty minutes in.