The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)

Directed by Mark Dindal. Starring (voices) David Spade, John Goodman, Eartha Kitt, Patrick Warburton, Wendie Malick, Kellyann Kelso, Eli Russell Linnetz, John Fiedler. [G]

A groovy goof of a movie from Disney is one of the biggest (and most delightful) surprises out of the company’s animation division in almost a decade. Kuzco, the smarmy, entitled young ruler of the Incan Empire, decides to displace goodhearted villager Pacha by building his summer palace on the hill Pacha calls home, but not before firing his ancient adviser, Yzma. Yzma doesn’t take it well, and plots to poison the emperor with the help of her slow-witted henchman, Kronk, but something goes wrong and the emperor is transformed into a llama instead. It’s a story so thin it’s transparent, with bare-boned character development and instantly foreseeable arcs (or lack thereof) for all the major parties…but the pic is so fast, fresh and offbeat in its presentation, I grinned from end to end. Voicing Kuzco and Pacha, David Spade and John Goodman deliver the sort of stuff you expect (for better or worse)—the former is a little too smug, the latter is a little too amiably edgeless, but they’re fine and dandy on average—but the real stars are Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton, a cackling scenery-chomper and a virtuoso of the deadpan, matched like they were one of the great vaudevillian comedy duos in a previous life. Fans of Disney’s more lush, richly-colored and shaded animation style may be taken aback by the stylized visuals here, pleasantly “flat” and caricatured in shapely, elegant ways, but I found it as refreshing as the pervasive sense of humor, overflowing with slapstick and one-liners, sometimes silly, sometimes witty—put it all together, and you’ve got yourself the funniest animated movie Disney has ever produced for the big screen. Sting penned a couple of tunes for the soundtrack (one sung by him, another by Tom Jones), but they don’t really gel with the off-the-wall tone of the humor/story.

77/100