“The valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was shrieking, ‘Not a god nor a devil but only a man!’”
-Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King
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| Petty Asshole |
In 1994, still relatively fresh off of their hit Aladdin, screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio were approached by then Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg about writing a movie set during the Age of Discovery. He was particularly interested in the world of early Spanish America, giving the writers Hugh Thomas’ Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico as a guideline. Katzenberg envisioned it as a kind of grand historical epic on par with the then also in early development Prince of Egypt, more akin to Aguirre the Wrath of God than a classical Disney-style fairy tale -and would help kick off his new studio DreamWorks Animation with a loud and distinct bang. Instead, Elliott and Rossio wrote it as an homage to the old Hollywood Bing Crosby and Bob Hope Road to... comedies of the 1940s, off of the simple idea of ‘what if the comic relief sidekicks of a Disney movie (who are often the more popular characters) were the leads’.
The appeal of this idea was too much for the writers to pass up. As Elliott said “[Sidekick characters] get to be flawed. They get to be greedy, or venal, or stupid …they don’t always evidence the virtuous, well-meaning traits the heroes have to. In short, they are more anti-heroes than heroes.”[1] It resulted in a treatment exceptionally different to anything Disney was putting out, with elements of Don Quixote, a more risque PG-13 rating, and a mature depiction of the cultural genocide of the Mayan civilization. 
And then in 1996 Katzenberg decided it should be a reliably marketable adventure comedy instead and the whole thing was fucked. Elliott and Rossio had to rewrite the script several times, the film was put on indefinite hold, the animators were shortchanged due to The Prince of Egypt being the studios’ priority, and eventually the directors (The Secret of NIMH alum Will Finn and The Simpsons’ David Silverman) left the project to be replaced by the far less experienced Don Paul and future convicted rapist Eric “Bilbo” Bergeron. Katzenberg himself ultimately became intrusively involved, obsessed with rushing the production at all costs so as to get the film out before Disney’s similarly themed The Emperor’s New Groove, and it resulted in the production being an absolute mess.
But it made that date, arriving nine months ahead of Disneys’ film. The Road to El Dorado was released on March 31st 2000 opening against High Fidelity and was an almost immediate box office bomb. The reviews weren’t kind either. Todd McCarthy wrote “The Road to El Dorado is a strained and pallid concoction that won’t fire the collective imaginations of modern children.”[2] Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “little more than a sanitized blend of nonsense and adventure and just a teensy bit of romance, interspersed with the occasional pop song.”[3] It was just another animated dud trying to ape Disney, and just a few years later nobody cared to remember that weird cartoon history movie about two white guys and a city of gold.
I loved The Road to El Dorado. Still do. I think it’s one of the most underrated animated comedies in the western history of the medium in fact. But for the longest time I knew no one else who did. My peers either had never heard of it or had no interest in seeing it. As far as the identity of DreamWorks Animation, it and all of its 2D ilk quickly got eclipsed by Shrek the following year. But then about ten years ago The Road to El Dorado started turning up online in the forms of memes, gifs, and other such disposable references on the internet (I suspect possibly due to some nerd noticing the resemblance between protagonists Miguel and Tulio and Thor and Loki, or shippers discovering a homoerotic undercurrent to their relationship). Soon enough the movie gradually started to be rediscovered and reappraised and is now a bona fide cult classic.
But while I stand by my appraisal and personal love of the movie, it’s clear with hindsight that The Road to El Dorado is a film that’s ambitions and potential far exceeded its capabilities; that as fun as it is, it could have been a lot better, and the troubled production is the most glaring reason why its’ not. Watching it again you can feel how rushed and ramshackle it is, it’s not hard to see how plot points and set pieces were conceived and put together on the fly. The movie as a whole has a major pacing problem, every character but the two protagonists is underdeveloped, their own conflict is forced and poorly considered, and while the animation generally is rich and beautiful in spite of the lack of resources, the CG 3D elements are painfully dated.
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| What fresh hell is this? |
Perhaps above all is the movies’ bizarre use of songs. “Friends Never Say Goodbye” notwithstanding, I actually like Elton John’s soundtrack for this movie quite a bit (particularly songs that don’t actually make it into the movie like “16th Century Man” and “Queen of Cities”; and the end track “Someday Out of the Blue” might even be one of my favourites from Elton), but the numbers are extremely poorly integrated into the film itself. And on top of that is the confusing choice to give only one song in-movie diegesis. The musical component overall is just terribly thought out.
On the other hand, the movie is still wonderfully colourful and energetic, the voice acting is tremendous from just about everyone, the classical adventure spirit is absolutely palpable, and it is very very funny, boasting some of the sharpest writing at least in the dialogue of any animated movie I’ve seen. And I would have to disagree with any of the critics calling it a Disney knock-off (though certain elements such as the songs play into that impression), as its characters, style, and story are quite a departure from what Disney was known for at the time. Anastasia, Quest for Camelot, and The Swan Princess were Disney knock-offs. The Road to El Dorado most certainly wasn’t. It even retained some of the more edgy material of the original draft in adult references, innuendo, and that one scene everyone feels so smart for noticing.
But the thing is, there’s something else to The Road to El Dorado. A shadow over the whole film from its story contents to elements of its very conception that has to be addressed. And you need look no further than Tzekel-Kan’s skull cap, or the city’s aesthetic, or just about everything to do with Chel, or the fact the white Europeans and indigenous Mesoamericans speak the same language without even the littlest attempt at an explanation, to find it. We’ve got to talk about colonialism.
The history The Road to El Dorado is set against is a particularly shameful and bloody one. It’s the early age of empiricism and the Spanish conquest of central America and the Caribbean. Taking place in 1519, The Road to El Dorado depicts the beginning of Hernán Cortés’ campaign of war and genocide against the Aztecs, ultimately completed in 1521. Famously, Cortés declared “we Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.” The indigenous people were enslaved and tortured, died not only of battle but of diseases brought over by the Europeans, such as smallpox, and suffered from famine and drought. Their great king Moctezuma II was killed and the other ruling elites massacred by occupying Conquistadors in Tenochtitlan during a feast in 1520.
To justify the atrocities, misleading histories about the Aztec and Mayan peoples, their culture and traditions began to spread, painting them as savage warlike natives whose customs, which included human sacrifice, nominal acts of cannibalism, and ritualistic polytheism, were easy to cast as evil by the Christian invaders. Though all of these things did exist as significant parts of Aztec culture, they were often exaggerated by the Europeans and divorced from context so as to give the impression of the people as a scary kind of barbarian race -and thus why it was all the more important to crush their civilization and kill or convert them. The old maxim states “history is written by the victors”, and so Mesoamerican civilization has been portrayed to these extremes ever since.
In The Road to El Dorado, charismatic con-men Tulio and Miguel accidentally stow away on Cortés’ fleet, are imprisoned, escape, become marooned in the Atlantic Ocean, only to wash ashore and follow a convenient map to the titular lost city of gold -never before encountered by white men despite there being this very clear map to the place. But rather than discover the city, they are discovered by its citizens and immediately mistaken for the locals’ gods.
It’s a classic premise, one with roots as far back as the Emperors of Ancient Rome, but here it recalls one particularly well-known variation. At some point during one of the rewrites, the story developed into a loose adaptation of Rudyard Kiplings’ The Man Who Would Be King, but from the angle of mistaken identity more than premeditated conquest to keep the characters relatively innocent. Nonetheless, in both stories two men take advantage of a less-developed civilization for their own benefit, reap the rewards and luxury of their false idol status, one becomes too attached to the role he fashioned for himself, and the clue to their mortality ultimately comes from bleeding.
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| Pictured: A racist who got it right one time |
However there’s one key but extremely important difference. The Man who would be King is found out and killed for his deception, his partner only surviving long enough to tell their story. It’s a karmic resolution, a classic cautionary moral on arrogance, deception, the danger of power that corrupts, and a shrewd critique, if not outright satire, of British colonialism and exceptionalism -from Rudyard Kipling of all people, the bastard who wrote Mandalay, Gunga Din and The White Mans’ Burden! But in The Road to El Dorado, the heroes are not found out, they pull off their con, and while they lose most of the gold they tried to get away with, that’s just a circumstantial detail. They had no intention of giving up their spoils if it could be helped.
Not only does The Road to El Dorado subvert the ending and thus principal meaning of The Man Who Would Be King, but it plays into those very ideas of indigenous culture propagated by colonizers, as well as additional ones to arise since. El Dorado has no specific model, incorporating elements of Aztec, Mayan, and Incan culture and iconography; but within this generality the three prominent El Dorado characters are specific archetypes. The most obvious is Tzekel-Kan, embodying the classic Mesoamerican witch doctor. His reverence for the gods and particularly their most violent aspects is held in stark relief against the values and beliefs of the false gods themselves. You’re meant to see Tzekel-Kan’s values, representative of those of his entire culture, as aberrant, perverse, and evil, while those of the Christian Spaniards as enlightened, moral, and just. That’s not me defending the idea of human sacrifice (I think the Doctor Who episode “The Aztecs” has a much more nuanced conversation about the topic, despite being problematic in its own ways), but it speaks to how the movie others that culture.
It tries to walk that back of course by portraying the rest of the natives as somewhat disapproving agnostics who don’t much respect their own mythology. This is best consolidated in the character of Chief Tannabok, a stand-in for a kind of native character very prevalent through literature since colonization that also insidiously reinforced the tenets of that ideology: the noble savage. He is the wise native chief attached just enough to his people and their way of life to be compellingly foreign, but accommodating enough to be digestible to whites. He is Friday, he is Chingachgook, he is Tonto, he is Kipling’s own Gunga Din. Tannabok is an opposing voice of reason to Tzekel-Kan, less hung up on tradition and far more open to the European morals being instilled by Miguel and Tulio.
Even more open to them is Chel, whose complicity in their scheme and exoticized sexuality firmly casts her as a kind of Indian princess in spite of her distinct Rosie Perez attitude and humour. Her motivation is non-existent, a passing remark about dreams and adventure only, but no further discussion is had about her background and choice. Perhaps this was done to more immediately fit her into the Dorothy Lamour role to compliment the films’ Crosby and Hope analogues, but there are certain racial ramifications that arise from that -namely that with no stake in the matter and her plot relevance consisting mostly of being a love interest, she more or less falls back into the role of the ethnic object of desire.
And Chel was designed to be explicitly sexual (possibly another of Katzenberg’s attempts to outdo the flaunted sexuality of Disney’s Esmerelda -herself teeming with gendered racial connotations). With her uncovered pronounced hips and legs, notable bust, thin eyes and thick lips, heavy bangs and body language, she’s designed to a very particular impression of fetishized Latina womanhood: ethnic, alluring, shapely, and “sexually available”. It’s no coincidence that, while naughty visual jokes have frequently found their way into animated movies, the memorable one concerning her is notably sexually subservient in nature.
So these are all stock characters with their roots in colonialism but how does the film itself convey a colonialist message? Especially when the climax is all about keeping El Dorado from being discovered by the imperialist Cortés? Well, because Miguel and Tulio’s presence and power in El Dorado amounts to a gentle colonialism itself. Upon realizing the mistaken identities thrust upon them, the pair immediately exploit the natives and their religion, playing up the lie and basking in the riches they’re ordained with. They impose their own morality on their newfound subjects, trick them into buying their feats of grandeur, and conspire to rob them of a substantial portion of their wealth. But a lot of this is disguised within the framing of the film, where their influence is painted as largely positive, or at least harmless and comical -the most apparent hoarding greed aspect circumvented by the ending where they just happen to lose all the gold.
See it’s a good thing that they disrupt such time-honoured traditions of disposing of earthly possessions and ritual sacrifice. It’s good that they enforce their own morality and ideology on the culture that better aligns with their views. It’s not …bad that they employ slave labour to build them a ship in just three days. Because they’re nice and cunning and charming and just a little bit cheeky. They let these people build idols to them, it’s no big deal. Because they’re two guys and not an army, because they’re generally non-violent, it’s easy to see what they’re doing as something separate, not connected to “real” colonialism, certainly when compared to the formidable, frightening Cortés -who really ought to have been the movies’ central villain. Even when they finally leave, they do so by directly saving the people from a greater threat -yes, the white saviour strikes again! It shows that THESE colonizers have El Dorado’s best interests at heart and it makes their colonialism okay. 
But it is still colonialism, and the darker sides are subtly on display. It’s in Tulio’s self-serving preoccupations, but more strongly in Miguel’s story arc. His desire to stay in El Dorado rather than return to Spain is insubstantial romanticism desperately trying to avoid the power lust of his Kipling counterpart Daniel Dravot. On a story level it’s one of the weakest elements: Miguel’s compulsion has no resonance, because the holes in that plan are too blatant and without adequate reason. It’s a lazy source of conflict, but it provides a great colonial parallel that equates Miguel on some level with figures such as Herzog’s Aguirre: the man who instills himself ruler over an indigenous kingdom.
Again, it doesn’t matter how well his intentions are, that is what he was doing. And it is something much clearer to the average audience as dictatorial colonialism, hence why he backtracks at the last minute for even emptier reasons; but not before getting the standard Jesus shot in emphasis of his heroism, lending legitimacy to his deification, at least towards the people of El Dorado.
All this considered, it’s difficult to divorce The Road to El Dorado from its assertions of colonialist apologia; a movie that renounces an obvious bad example of a concept with its’ own “good” alternative, much like the Disney Companys’ attitude towards capitalism. And like Disney Capitalism, it reinforces a status quo and a series of comfortable stereotypes without ever critiquing the system at hand itself. In fact, it basks in the fruits of that system. This isn’t to say these things necessarily make The Road to El Dorado a bad movie, but colonialism is baked deeply into the films’ text and it’s worth analyzing and asking why. Certainly I can’t help but wonder what a better version would have looked like, that framed colonization in an inherently bad light -perhaps closer to that first draft that would have had the people of El Dorado escape, but the city itself falling to Cortés.
“The original film was intended to be more ambitious, more complex,” says Terry Rossio. “Containing perhaps deeper characterizations, with an eye toward a more sophisticated storytelling to bring off a more sophisticated theme, and more compelling drama. The finished film was simplified in every respect.”[4]
Lessons were not learned from The Road to El Dorado. Even after DreamWorks finally found its own level of success and brand identity with Shrek (arguably yet just another aping of the Disney model -only this time for satire), Katzenberg continued to try and best Disney through rushed productions and general pettiness. Sinbad: The Legend of the Seven Seas, Shark Tale, and Flushed Away were all attempts to more or less beat Disney at their own game. Yet of course where DreamWorks ultimately found its biggest hits, both commercially and critically, were in the ideas that were firmly theirs such as Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. The Road to El Dorado, retroactively popular though it may have become, is an obvious relic of a studio finding its footing and desperate for gains over its competitors. It is a film bearing flaws more apparent with age, and themes that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
“The Aztecs said that by no means would they give themselves up, for as long as one of them was left he would die fighting, and that we would get nothing of theirs because they would burn everything or throw it into the water.”
-Third Dispatch from Hernán Cortés to King Charles V, 15th May, 1522[5]
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[5]Bartlett, John, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations 18th edition, edited by Geoffrey O’Brien, p. xxix, 2014
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