Summary Of The Emperor's New Groove

(RE)CONSTRUCTING HISTORY Both released in the year 2000, Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove and DreamWorks’ The Road to El Dorado introduce their viewers to exciting tales of friendship and adventure as beloved characters brave the exotic South American continent. The Emperor’s New Groove tells the tale of Kuzco, an egocentric and cocky Emperor-turned-llama, and Pacha, Kuzco’s unlikely acquaintance-turned-friend, as they traverse the countryside and seek to regain Kuzco’s royal throne from his evil advisor Yzma. The tale’s context is readily recognized as Inca Peru but never blatantly identified (Silverman 299), as Disney avoids solidly locating The Emperor’s New Groove in any particular geographical or temporal locale. Similarly, though explicitly

In representing without acknowledging, Disney epitomizes the concept of cultural appropriation in The Emperor’s New Groove. Co-opting local histories while simultaneously emptying them of their corresponding local, social, and political geographies allows Disney to use an entire culture as little more than a vessel in which to sell Americans beliefs and attitudes. This leads to the conception of these places as little more than empty terrains to be colonized (Schaffer 2) and slates upon which to write history. Much like Schaffer describes as occurring in The Three Caballeros (Schaffer 10), these films essentially flatten-out and Americanize local cultures so that the “foreign” aspects of these strange places can be most easily consumed by the North American viewer. This concept is metaphorically embodied in the scene in which Tulio and Miguel anticipate their impending peril and together reflect upon their greatest regrets. Having escaped from Spain in two barrels aboard Cortes’ ship, having then subsequently escaped Cortes’ ship, and now being hopelessly lost at sea, the pair deems their mission doomed and gives up on finding the City of Gold. Floating at sea and awaiting their death, the two men reveal their largest regrets: never finding fold (Tulio) and never making history (Miguel). These two regrets quite explicitly indicate the way in which DreamWorks is portraying El Dorado: an empty land to be exploited and slate upon which European history can be scribed. Native culture exists to be exploited and consumed. Though purported to be transcendent acts of cross-cultural understanding and representation (such as certain types of tourism (Williams 84)), these movies turn out to be acts of packaging Latin American for North American consumption (Burton 38). Supposedly representing the Other, these films simply utilize transnational platforms to universalize and promote American ideals (this concept