My Review of 'The Road to El Dorado'

I actually forgot about the movie, The Road to El Dorado, a long time ago. After all, it was released nineteen years ago. My girlfriend said she remembered liking it back a long time ago. I remembered it differently. There was a ton of advertisements for this movie when it first came out and it looked interesting back in the day.

When this movie came out, I was still in university and I had taken a class called Indigenous Politics. That class was an eye opener not only on my outlook of how Indigenous people are treated but how they're portrayed in the media. When this movie came out, I remember my teacher mentioning this and how she hated it. As an indigenous person herself, she found it offensive and totally blind of the themes that it was suggesting. It made me wonder about the film but I never had the chance to see it.

This movie so happened to be on Netflix for a long time as well and I never got to watch it. Today is the day to do it! So when my girlfriend suggested watching it, I jumped at the chance to see for myself what the fuss was about. When we start watching this movie I start to see why my old professor found this movie so unsavory. It isn't constantly offensive but it only takes a little to get under your skin. I get it, I've seen certain movies that have maybe one scene that makes me uncomfortable and I won't want to watch it. This movie has a huge theme to it that indigenous people will find offensive.

The movie is about two Spaniard con-men, Miguel and Tulio. They scam a map to El Dorado from one of their little con jobs. They eventually get in trouble by authorities and stow away on a boat. They get caught on this boat and eventually get shipwrecked on a mysterious new land that fits the descriptions of the map that they won. They eventually find El Dorado.

The part where I can see my old professor getting into a tussle about is that they find the mysterious city of gold and fool the indigenous people of El Dorado that they're gods. They're loved and revered and worshiped. Basically, they're the so-called "white saviors" that today's movies are being criticized for.

Apart from the terrible theme of the movie, the visuals are very impressive. It is animated beautifully and the picture is so crisp and clean you'd swear you're watching a moving painting. There are some drawbacks though. Back in the early 2000s, it was a new thing to be using CGI in hand-drawn movies. It was an early adaptation so it is painstakingly obvious when CGI was added to the movie. That's too bad because the hand-drawn animation is so beautiful.

The music was actually done by Elton John. I didn't particularly find much of the music that memorable though. Maybe it was the fact that it wasn't played so much. I guess they picked him to do the music after his smash hits with the Lion King.

If you look past the political incorrectness of the movie, I wouldn't say that this movie was terribly entertaining. There are some slow moments. It picks up later, but it is also terribly predictable as well. My girlfriend wanted to shut it off midway through the movie because she got bored. So maybe the movie hasn't aged quite that well.

Overall, this movie can be somewhat entertaining with your blinders on. I wouldn't suggest watching it though. Today there are a ton of better-animated films to watch. They practically come out twice a year. In nineteen years, that's a ton of movies. I will, unfortunately, give this movie a 5 out of 10. It's not the absolute worse, but it's pretty bad. The standards for animated films keep going up and this movie is a casualty of the quality of animated movies that have been coming out recently. Too bad, because the hand-drawn animation was so beautiful in this movie.