This is a surprising change for Disney who holds such classic movies like “Beauty and the Beast”, “Cinderella”, and “Snow White” to their roster. “The Emperor’s New Groove” changes the frequently predictable and rather formulaic plotlines from the recent Disney epics and breaks the mold. It starts off telling the story of a very spoiled Mesopotamian prince by the name of Kuzco (David Spade) who is going to tear down a village for a summer home he is building, but unfortunately Pacha (John Goodman), the leader of the village can do nothing about it. Yzma (Eartha Kitt, Kuzco’s advisor is trying to take over the throne while Kuzco is away on business, Kuzco discovers this and fires Yzma, who then attempts to poison him and claim the throne once more with the help of her assistant, the dumb Kronk.
But things don’t turn out well and the liquid thought to be poison turns Kuzco into a llama mistakenly. Yzma sends Kronk to dump the unconscious Kuzco down a waterfall. Kronk has a last minute change of heart but accidentally misplaces Kuzco, leaving him in the hands of Pacha. Now kuzco and pacha must journey back to the kingdom and retrieve his throne from Yzma and turn back into a human to rule again. One aspect that I instantly noticed and loved was that The animation is wacky and unrealistic. Often, the characters and facial expressions are overtly exaggerated. The cast is quite top-notch. David Spade provides a very humorous performance and pulls it out smoothly.
John Goodman is really good just as well. But the highest point in here is the extremely hilarious Patrick Warburton, his inept acting and dumb sayings make his character the best thing in here. I found myself laughing aloud constantly with Warburton’s character. This is a great movie and is highly recommended. The only true problem is the length of the movie. This movie only has a running time of one hour and eighteen minutes. I felt they could have done a lot more with the characters and could have shown a lot more hijinks in the jungle with Pacha and Kuzco if the film had been longer. Another low point was the high amount of fluff in this. At times it was too fluffy, especially the ending. While the film does occasionally boast entertainment, it ultimately essentially has many flaws with empty humor, an almost non-existent plot, a story that’s much too shot, and a lot of fluff that never amounts to a good film.