Watched: 12/13/2025
Format: Disney+
Viewing: Second (I think. Maybe third? Jamie will tell me.)
Director: Mark Dindal
I remember quite liking The Emperor's New Groove (2000) when I saw it in December of 2000. I believe Jamie, The Dug and I went to see it on Christmas Eve in Lawton during it's initial release. But I haven't come back to it over the years. No real reason - there are many movies and I don't rewatch everything.
The other week, I saw some memes using Gronk imagery recently and was thinking "man, why have I not rewatched that movie?" Frankly, aside from David Spade's character becoming a llama, I didn't really remember much about the movie other than "it is funny".
On a revisit, it's an odd Disney film. It feels very... small. And for a movie with "groove" in the title, it has I think one song and it's performed by Tom Jones?
It moves along at a rapid clip, and the vibe is absolutely wacky for a Disney movie. And with that, the jokes seem aimed more at the adults in the audience than the kids, who will just enjoy the physical humor - of which there is plenty, and it's really solid. And, in fact, the movie feels very late 90's in a way that's hard to put a finger on. The jokes are a bit edgier sometimes - the characters casually cruel for laughs.
The movie has a small cast of characters - voiced by John Goodman (as Pacha), David Spade (as Kuzco), Eartha Kitt (as Yzma), Patrick Wharburton (as Kronk) and Wendie Malick (as Chicha).
It's really short - clocking in at 78 minutes - barely long enough to be considered a theatrical feature. The animation is a bit... less than most Disney features from the era.
And, apparently, there's good reason for that. There's a whole documentary that Disney has more or less tried to hide, but can be found, called The Sweatbox. And it's about how this movie started as a very late-90's Disney film. They'd planned to have a soundtrack by Sting, and it was basically borrowing from The Prince and the Pauper. Even animation studies are far less stylized in the flat, 2D look we're familiar with and more like a post-Little Mermaid Disney film.
But apparently that whole first effort fell apart and they kind of started over. I cannot imagine the sunk cost.
So, yeah, to some extent, The Emperor's New Groove is Disney's hail mary to salvage a project that was struggling. And while I think the movie basically feels complete - it doesn't feel much like a Disney film while you're watching it. It doesn't even have any particularly strong emotional beats, and there's no point where there's a lot of swelling music. It plays more like a screwball buddy comedy.
I do find it ironic that this movie got turned upside down in the story department when we just came off the deadly dull Dinosaur, moved into the trainwreck of Atlantis, then we got Treasure Planet, Brother Bear and the abysmal Home on the Range in rapid succession. So, no, I have no idea what happened at Disney after Mulan. I do think Disney comes and goes in waves and the vaunted processes of Disney may lead to collisions of taste and sensibility that materialize as "story problems".
That said - I think this movie works, I generally enjoyed it, but it never feels like Disney. And that's not a complaint. It's just such an oddball film.
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