One of Disney's worst, or at least the least ambitious.

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2001)

Note to Eisner: I, for one, would have liked to have seen a more ambitious animated feature about Incas. Instead, you give us. . . David Spade?
I'm still not sure how you can call this movie a version of The Emperor's New Clothes. But of course, you wouldn't have the guts to do a true version of that story--some mother somewhere would complain about its immorality and its indecency, and you'd be the laughing stock of the animation world.
Wait a minute. You are already. (End note).
Begin review: One of my biggest problems with this movie is that I can't stand David Spade. Dana Carvey, a little, but Spade is just so grating to me in everything he does: SNL, Just Shoot Me, his movies with Chris Farley. His delivery is always obvious, usually slapping us over the head with them as if he was wielding a giant tuna. Here, he's even more obnoxious and flat as a bratty Emperor (where's the royal family?) who wants to build a swimming pool on top of a peasant's (John Goodman) hill but ends up being turned into a llama by a conniving advisor. Yeah. A swimming pool on top of a hill in south America hundreds of years ago and a conniving, skull-faced advisor (think Jafar or Skar, only a woman).
Spoiler: Spade/Emperor also narrates the story throughout most of the movie, but the narration turns out to be bogus when the llama-fied Emperor suddenly tells the narrator that we (the audience) know what the real story was--the understatement of the millennium, I assure you, since Spade's one-note (over-the-top) narration is obvious before you even see his character as a human. So all that annoying jibber-jabber turned out to be necessary for that one joke in which the character breaks character to talk to the narrator, who is apparently not the real Emperor or he would've known what the other Emperor was already thinking . . . oh, forget it. It's a little funny simply because it's not expected, but it's not really original--I think Woody Allen did it a few times, and I know stuff like that happened in Looney Tunes on a regular basis.
That's another problem. The movie seems like an extended Looney Tune, something even Warner Brothers had trouble doing. Simply put, there are more (and better) jokes in just about any one of the better Bugs Bunny shorts (e.g. What's Opera Doc?, Rabbit of Seville) than there is in Emperor's New Groove. In fact, the only jokes I laughed out loud with were the repeated "shoulder angel" scenes and the reaction the villain and the Emperor have to Cronk talking to his shoulders (but even that was merely a one-step-farther parody of an over-used Looney Tunes gag).
This is an annoying change in direction that I hope Disney will not continue--Disney has been far too interested in comedy lately instead of character and story. Even the old Disney shorts (such as the Sorcerer's Apprentice piece from Fantasia) usually had a certain character depth that Warner Bros. cartoons often lacked (they relied on neat sight gags and movie parodies).
Worst of all, the animation is only so-so. There is absolutely no depth to the world they have created--no interesting "camera angles" or neat little touches like animals or insects or shafts of light or anything. The backgrounds are just there, instead of the characters reacting to the backgrounds as if they're in that world (for examples of location depth, take a look at My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, or Bambi). If I remember right, only a few scenes even shaded the characters according to the background (i.e. darker in forests or in buildings, much brighter when in the sun, spots of light that come in between leaves, etc.). The characters are animated very smoothly, but occasionally suffer from the previously mentioned Looney Tunes syndrome.
Eisner, I've made this plea before: please making important chases/ decisions/growth spurts/training sequences into quick-cut musical montages. There is nothing that takes me out of a movie quicker, and there's no excuse for doing so in animation.
Seriously, man, this is sillier than Oliver and Company.