DreamWorks Animation had made two features before The Road to El Dorado. Both were about bugs. The studio’s third film, released March 31, 2000, swapped the anthill for 1519 Spain and a map to a city of gold, and handed the leads to two live-action actors who had never carried a cartoon.
The result is a movie with a great central idea, a mismatched soundtrack, and a running time that never quite justifies itself. It grossed $76 million worldwide against a production budget of roughly $95 million. That makes it a box-office bomb by any measure. It is also, two decades on, a cult classic. Both things are true.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
Tulio, Miguel, and the Rigged Dice Game
The premise comes from the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road to… pictures, and the film knows it. Kevin Kline voices Tulio, the schemer. Kenneth Branagh voices Miguel, the dreamer. They win gold and a map to El Dorado in a rigged dice gamble against some sailors in Spain, though the map itself they win fairly, after one of the opponents hands Tulio normal dice. Then the con is exposed.
The pair evade the guards and stow away on a ship led by conquistador Hernán Cortés, bound for the New World. They are caught, imprisoned, and condemned to slavery in Cuba. They break free, steal a rowboat with help from Cortés’ mistreated horse, Altivo, and wash ashore somewhere in South America.
Miguel recognizes landmarks from the map. Tulio thinks a totem marker near a waterfall is a dead end. Then Chel arrives, a native woman chased by guards, voiced by Rosie Perez. The guards see the two men riding Altivo exactly as the totem depicts, and escort all three through a secret entrance behind the falls.
Mistaken for Gods in the City of Gold
Inside El Dorado, the elders are Chief Tannabok, kindhearted, voiced by Edward James Olmos, and his wicked advisor, high priest Tzekel-Kan, voiced by Armand Assante. A volcano erupts during an argument between Tulio and Miguel, then stops at the same moment. The city takes this as proof. The two con artists are twin gods.
They are given luxurious quarters, and Chel is assigned to attend them. She works out that they are conning her people, and promises to stay quiet if they take her with them when they leave. Tannabok showers them with gold. Tzekel-Kan tries to sacrifice a civilian at the gods’ ritual, which the two disapprove of. Cortés and his men reach land. Tulio and Miguel tell Tannabok to build them a boat so they can leave with the gifts, under a ruse.
That is the whole engine of the film, and it is a good one. Two liars are handed exactly what they wanted and discover they do not want it. The buddy relationship is the point. Producer Bonne Radford said as much: “The buddy relationship [between the duo] is the very heart of the story. They need each other because they’re both pretty inept. They’re opposites — Tulio is the schemer and Miguel is the dreamer. Their camaraderie adds to the adventure; you almost don’t need to know where they’re going or what they’re after, because the fun is in the journey.”
Two Actors in One Room
Kline, Branagh, and Perez all signed on August 15, 1998. What happened next is the most interesting production decision in the film. Kline and Branagh recorded their lines in the same studio room together, which is unusual for animation. The goal was realistic chemistry between two performers who never share a frame of physical film.
It worked, and then some. A good deal of improvised dialogue came out of those sessions, and some of it made the final cut. You can hear it. The two men talk over each other, cut each other off, and land jokes on the half-beat, which is not how animated leads usually sound. Most cartoons in 2000 were recorded one actor at a time against a wall of silence. The Road to El Dorado sounds like a room.
That is the film’s strongest asset, and it is why the cult has lasted. Branagh and Kline are doing a Hope-and-Crosby act, and they are doing it well. The animation around them is serviceable — bright, wide, competent — but it is not the reason anyone rewatches this.
Elton John, Tim Rice, and Hans Zimmer
The soundtrack is where the film gets strange. Hans Zimmer and John Powell composed the instrumental score. Elton John and Tim Rice wrote the songs. John also periodically narrates the story in song throughout the film, and he is credited in the cast as the Narrator.
Zimmer’s work earned praise, and it earned him the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Score at the 6th Critics’ Choice Awards, shared with his work on Gladiator, another DreamWorks film. That is a real award for real work, and the score holds up better than the movie around it.
The songs are a different matter. John and Rice had just come off The Lion King, and the comparison does this film no favors. The numbers stop the movie rather than move it, and the periodic narration in song keeps interrupting a story that was already being told perfectly well by two men in a recording booth. It is the clearest case of a film not trusting its own best idea.
The 2000 Release Calendar
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| August 15, 1998 | Kline, Branagh, and Perez sign onto the film |
| March 31, 2000 | Theatrical release in the United States |
| 2000 | Worldwide gross reaches $76 million |
| 6th Critics’ Choice Awards | Zimmer wins Best Score, shared with Gladiator |
The budget was approximately $95 million. The worldwide gross was $76 million. That gap is the story of the film’s opening, and no amount of later affection closes it.
What the Cult Classic Gets Right
Here is what the reevaluation gets right. The Road to El Dorado is funny in a way that most animated films of its era were not, because it let two gifted comic actors behave like gifted comic actors. Tulio and Miguel are not heroes and the film never pretends otherwise. They are two men who lie for a living and then have to live inside a lie that other people believe. That is a sharper premise than most family films attempt, and the script by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, with additional sequences directed by Will Finn and David Silverman, keeps the con at the center.
Chel is a genuine participant in that con, not a prize. She catches them, she cuts a deal, and she holds it. Perez plays her with more edge than the part strictly requires, and the movie is better for it. Assante’s Tzekel-Kan is the film’s one real threat, and Olmos gives Tannabok a warmth that keeps the city from reading as a punchline.
Where the Film Loses Its Nerve
The problems are structural. The film runs 90 minutes and still feels like it is missing a third act. The boat gets ordered, the ruse tightens, Cortés closes in, and then the resolution arrives faster than the setup deserved. The volcano gag that sells the god mistake is a coincidence the film never bothers to complicate.
And the songs. Every time John’s narration cuts in, the momentum dies. A movie built on two men talking cannot afford to keep stopping for a ballad. The score is doing the emotional work the songs think they are doing, and Zimmer got the award for it.
This is a 5.1 out of 10. That is not a dismissal. It is a film with a first-rate premise, a first-rate pair of performances, a first-rate score, and a second-rate set of songs wrapped around a third act that never shows up. The $76 million against $95 million is not a mystery. The cult is not a mystery either. Both are the same fact: the good parts are very good, and there are not enough of them.
5.1 of 10.
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