The Road to El Dorado

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The Road to El Dorado
The Road To El Dorado DVD cover
Directed by	Eric Bergeron Don Paul
Produced by	Bonne Radford Brooke Breton
Written by	Ted Elliot Terry Rossio
Starring	Kevin Kline Kenneth Branagh Rosie Perez
Music by	Hans Zimmer John Powell Tim Rice Elton John
Distributed by	DreamWorks SKG
Release date(s)	2000
Running time	1 hr. 29 min.
Country	U.S.A.
Language	English
Budget	$95 Million
IMDb profile

The Road To El Dorado is an animated comedy film by DreamWorks SKG released in 2000. The soundtrack features songs by Elton John and Tim Rice.

The movie takes place in 16th century (1519) Spain and tells about two men named Tulio and Miguel. During a game of dice in Spain, they manage to win a map that purportedly shows the location of the legendary city of gold in the New World. However, their cheating is soon discovered and as a result, they end up as stowaways on Hernán Cortés' fleet to conquer Mexico. They are discovered, but manage to escape in a boat with Cortés' prize war horse and eventually discover the hidden city of El Dorado where they are mistaken for gods.

El Dorado is portrayed as a Utopian civilization that combines facets of the Aztecs, Maya and Incas.

The soundtrack was released as the album The Road to El Dorado.

1 Production
2 Synopsis
3 Criticism
4 Trivia
5 External links

[edit] Production

The creation of The Road To El Dorado was a challenge for the studio because Dreamworks had devoted most of its creative efforts to its first animated film, The Prince of Egypt.

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

El Dorado's opening includes a song telling the legend of El Dorado. According to the legend, El Dorado was built by two gods, on a horse-like creature, 1000 years ago.

It then cuts to 1519 Spain, where Hernán Cortés is leaving with his troops for the New World. Miguel (Kenneth Branagh) and Tulio (Kevin Kline), two wanted conmen, are nearby swindling sailors with loaded dice. After the sailors run out of money, one insists on a last bet with his map portraying El Dorado in the New World. Miguel wants the map and convinces Tulio to go for it. He does, but the sailor insists using his own dice. Surprisingly, Miguel and Tulio win, but as Tulio is gathering his winnings, the loaded dice fall out of his vest and the sailors discover the con. They begin an improvisational argument where Tulio blames Miguel for giving him loaded dice and Miguel insists that Tulio was the real thief. As their acting escalates, they grab swords and begin a duel which takes them to the top of a nearby building, at which point they jump down to the ground on the other side of the building, effectively escaping. An angry bull takes them by surprise, and Tulio and Miguel become the objects of a chase scene which ends at the docks, where they jump in barrels which are loaded onto Cortés' ship.

On the ship, they are discovered and mistaken for stowaways. Cortés will not tolerate stowaways and has them locked in the brig. After much head-pounding-against-a-wall, Tulio decides their best chance of escape is to steal a longboat and try rowing back to Spain, but is unable to come up with a plan to escape their cell. Fortunately a sailor drops an apple by accident, and Miguel uses it to bribe Cortés' horse (named Altivo, meaning "haughty" in Spanish), who is standing near by, to fetch a pry bar. He returns with keys instead. In the dead of night the duo leave the cell and load up a longboat, but as they lower themselves into the water Altivo neighs for the apple he was promised. Tulio tosses Altivo his apple but it bounces off various objects on the ship and ends up in the ocean, where the horse follows. Miguel attempts to save him and they end up losing all of their supplies. After a storm and many foodless and waterless days, they finally reach the shores of the New World.

Miguel, Tulio, and Altivo are overjoyed, but then they see skeletons impaled with swords and decide to leave. While leaving Miguel notices a rock in the shape of an eagle and recognizes it from the map. He convinces Tulio to go to El Dorado and loot it and they begin their trip through the jungle. After many small adventures, they wander onto the last part of the map, and all that they find is a rock depicting the legendary gods. Mistakenenly thinking the rock is El Dorado, they begin to leave when a woman emerges from behind the rock and runs into them. She is being chased by a group of tribal warriors for stealing a gold object. The whole group sees Tulio and Miguel on Altivo - which looks a lot like the two gods on the rock - and take them through the watery tunnel passage into El Dorado. As they leave, the "rock" is revealed to be made out of solid gold.

There some of the soldiers notify Chief Tannabok (Edward James Olmos) and high priest Tzekel-Kan (Armand Assante) of the arrival. Tulio and Miguel are led to a large courtyard where Tzekel-Kan addresses a crowd, telling them the gods have arrived. The pair realize that they've been mistaken for deities, and encourage the ruse. Chief Tannabok asks them why they have chosen now to arrive and Tzekel-Kan warns him not to question the gods. Miguel warns that he will unleash his power if they do, which is unfortunately exactly what Tzekel-Kan wants. Taking Miguel aside, Tulio scolds him for pushing their luck, and they begin to argue how to get out of this. As Tulio gets angrier and talks faster, a volcano begins to erupt and it stops coincidentally when Tulio yells "stop". The city accepts them as gods and they are taken to a temple, where they are offered a feast that night and a ceremony at dawn.

The pair begin celebrating that they have found this "whole city of suckers" and plan how to loot it. The woman they saw by the rock overhears them, and she, Chel (Rosie Perez), says she wants to join the con and she offers to help them pretend to be gods. The boys are hesitant, but have little choice but to accept. They have fun at the feast, singing "It's Tough To Be a God," which is the only song in the movie that is not sung by Elton John. The next dawn, when Tzekel-Kan offers a human sacrifice, they are quick to stop the killing, instead accepting the Chief's tribute of gold. Hoping to leave with the loot, they ask the Chief to build them a boat, but are told that the construction will take three days. Meanwhile, Cortés lands on the beach and begins to follow the pair's trail to El Dorado.

Worried that they will be unable to keep up the illusion, Tulio tells Miguel to lie low, but Chel persuades him to leave and explore the city so that she can seduce Tulio in his absence. Miguel has fun teaching the locals to play the mandolin and learning their version of a Mesoamerican ballgame. Tzekel-Kan, unhappy that the gods are not as violent and destructive as foretold, goes to the temple to convince Tulio of the importance of human sacrifice, and when Tulio hears that Miguel is playing with the locals they both leave to find him. Tzekel-Kan initiates a much more serious Mesoamerican ballgame, with the duo against a team of bulky warriors, and Tulio and Miguel barely win by using an armadillo as a ball to cheat. Miguel objects to sacrificing the losing team as Tzekel-Kan had hoped, but Tzekel-Kan, seeing blood seep from a small cut above Miguel's right eyebrow, realizes that Miguel and Tulio are mortals.

Soon after Tulio admits to Chel that he wants her to come back to Spain with him, and Miguel, spying on them, is furious. As the night's celebrations begin, Tzekel-Kan attacks them with a giant jaguar statue that he controls. Miguel and Tulio are chased to the edge of a whirlpool, and, using the same argument technique as they did in the beginning of the movie, manage to knock both priest and statue into the whirlpool. It quickly becomes apparent to both that this argument was very real, and as a result, Miguel will stay in El Dorado while Tulio leaves with Chel for Spain. Tzekel-Kan, who somehow survived the whirlpool, is found by Cortés, who embodies the destructive godliness that the priest was waiting for. Believing he has found his true gods, Tzekel-Kan begins to lead Cortés to El Dorado.

As Tulio and Chel board the boat, they see smoke rising over the horizon, and a scout returns to tell the Chief about Tzekel-Kan and Cortés. Miguel insists that the native warriors cannot fight the invaders, and Tulio, by a stroke of luck, comes up with a plan to stop them: they'll cause the tunnel entrance to the city to cave in by smashing the boat into the pillars that support it. As they put this plan into action, the boat's sail becomes stuck. Seeing that his friend is in danger, Miguel jumps onto the boat, opening the sail as he lands, making a decision to come with Tulio rather than stay in the city forever. The three succeed in crashing the boat into the pillars and cutting off the city from the outside world forever, but they lose their ship and all the gold. Cortés approached at that moment, and seeing no entrance, dismisses Tzekel-Kan as a liar and leaves, taking the priest with him. Miguel and Tulio reconcile, and the three of them hop on Altivo (who is wearing gold horseshoes) to set off for the next adventure.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Criticism

There is a confusion between Hernán Cortés, who is seen in the movie looking for the city, and Gonzalo Pizarro, who actually led the original Spanish expedition for El Dorado in 1541.

Chel the native woman and Tulio are the romantic pairing in this film and there was much criticism from parents stemming from the insinuation that Chel and Tulio slept together in a scene of the movie. Instead of falling in love and making much to-do about their first kiss as a normal children's animated film would, Tulio and Chel are shown making out and half-dressed. Besides the sexual content, there was mild language (like when Tulio, Miguel, and Altivo are in the longboat and a bigger boat nearly runs them over, Tulio yells, "Hoooooly ship!") in the movie and some crude humor.

[edit] Trivia

When Tzekel-Kan (the priest) is flipping through the pages of a spell book one of the illustrations resembles the DreamWorks logo of a boy sitting in the arc of a crescent moon fishing.
The name of the armadillo that is seen throughout the film (and used in the game that Miguel and Tulio play) is Bibo. Bibo is actually the nickname of Eric Bergeron, the french director of the movie.
The film is an homage to the classic "buddy" films of the 1940s starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Those films were always titled "The Road to ______" (Morocco, Utopia, Zanzibar, etc), involved two friends who accidentally find themselves en route to an exotic location, and a highly sexualized love interest (usually played by Dorothy Lamour). At one point in The Road to El Dorado, the reflections of Tulio and Miguel in running water briefly form caricatures of Crosby and Hope.
Originally in the script, the relationship between the main characters (Tulio and Miguel) was supposed to have more of an implication, with each calling the other by pet names like "darling." This would have heightened the tension when Chel came between them and when the argued about splitting up. The producers and other executives had the pet names and other references cut, but in some versions of the subtitles (which are often taken from original scripts), the pet names can still be seen.