The Emperor's New Groove

Everything is about imperialism

Emperor’s New Groove was released on December 10, 2000, three days before Al Gore, who invented both the internet and climate change, and who is near the top of the list of living presidential candidates I would definitely f***, formally conceded in the 2000 election, paving the way for a George Bush presidency, the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and such memorable quotes as “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream,” and “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and “I did 9/11.” I add this context just to show you what a different time it was, when this zany comedy led by David Spade, who was having a short (forgive me) Renaissance of his own, burst into theatres. It was a time when cracks were showing in the democratic process (just ask anyone born before 1990 about “pregnant chads”) but no one’s family dinners had yet been wrecked by a screaming match over whether jet fuel could melt steel beams. 

Colorcity via Flickr

The movie came out at the tail end of what’s been called “the Disney Renaissance,” a term used because it connotes both a revival of good art and also that white people are at the centre of it. Emperor’s New Groove is a criminally underrated movie, joining other such underloved gems as A Goofy Movie, the movie where we learn that Goofy definitely fucks, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which has three of the most delightful mascots of any Disney film, Hercules, which has the musical chops that Little Mermaid *thinks* it has, and Lilo and Stitch, which is one of the finest films ever made about how child protective services are just a bunch of fucking cops targeting poor people.

ANYWAY, the film opens with a very pathetic looking donkey thing that you are quickly advised is a llama (whatever THAT is) and we get a voiceover from Emperor Kuzco, who tells us that he was “the world’s nicest guy and they ruined my life for no reason.” I call this the Epstein Defense, where you’re just a charming guy with a rectangular head who has lots of money and wants to show people a good time and have a good time yourself and suddenly the feds are just all over you for no reason other than the mountains of evidence that you’ve been “trafficking children” and “committing aggravated rape” and “being friends with a limp knob like Prince Andrew.” Anyway, at this point we really have no reason not to believe Kuzco, other than the fact that he’s a whiny little bitch. But also he’s a sad llama in the rain, and honestly that’s a pretty sympathetic position to be in. So we’ll proceed with caution.

You may be saying, “Alex, I’m pretty sure that’s an alpaca” and my answer to that is that this is a free fucking newsletter, Becky.

Unlike most other Disney Renaissance films, The Emperor’s New Groove is set in the so-called “New World,” and it’s not a completely sanitized (yet still shockingly offensive) retelling of a European folk or fairy tale. The Incan empire of which our llama hero is god king has been described by a man quoted in a Wikipedia article that I just looked up as “one of the greatest imperial states in human history” and I have no reason to dispute this! This guy, who is almost certainly white because he is an anthropologist named Gordon, goes on to say that the Incans accomplished all of this without even having the wheel, or, presumably, Adderall. Impressive! So this sets us up to understand that Kuzco, before he became a llama, was, in his time (circa 1438-1533) one of the most powerful people alive on Earth. In terms of his Disney peers, I would say Kuzco is more powerful than the Lion King, who lacks opposable thumbs and loses 100% of his territory every time the sun sets, and the Beast, who was able to just vanish for 20 years without causing any administrative or juridical problems in the lands over which he was nominally sovereign, but less powerful than Triton, who is both extremely fuckable and can control the weather, and the Rescuers, who are darling little mice on the adventure of their lives.

The main antagonist of the film is Yzma, Kuzco’s advisor, who looks like maybe she’s related to the Blue Fugates or is a two pack a day smoker or SOMETHING, and is played deliciously by Eartha Kitt. Yzma is partnered with her himbo sidekick, Kronk, who is the kind of guy I imagine Cathy from the Aack comics would go crazy for. (Some fun trivia is that I thought Patrick Warburton, the voice of Kronk, was the guy who played Carrie’s on/off boyfriend Big on Sex and the City, BUT ACTUALLY that was Chris Noth. Warburton played Elaine’s on/off boyfriend Puddy on the original Sex and the City, Seinfeld. I would fuck Warburton, but not Noth, and Big, but not Puddy.)

I couldn’t find any open source pictures of the Blue Fugates (I barely tried) so here’s a picture Tobias from Arrested Development painted blue and taken by Conor O’Neil via Flickr

Kuzco likes to go on about how ancient Yzma is, but as someone understands how society views women with fully developed prefrontal cortices, my guess is that Yzma is probably, at most, 42. I’m not sure if she and Kronk are hitting it (it would be a workplace sexual harassment case if they were) but I just want to come out and say that she COULD hit it, IF SHE WANTED TO and IF IT WERE ETHICAL TO DO SO. Now, Kuzco fires Yzma basically for doing his job (which he was not, himself doing, because he was busy knocking around the palace to jazzy show tunes). The film wants to frame her as the villain, but I’m just going to come out and say it: as a non-unionized labourer who appears to have no family ties in an agrarian society built on communal inclusion, Yzma’s in a tough spot. Obviously if she had a union she could file a grievance with her shop steward for wrongful termination and ageism, but in this scenario, she’s basically left with no option except to murder her boss. It’s too bad, but labour laws are meant to protect all of us. 

We very quickly meet Pacha, who is going to be our working class hero on this journey and who is, frankly, the only thing that offsets the aggravating Kuzco enough for viewers to care what happens to him. Pacha is, uh, large, and his physique is best described as “small boulder the size of a large boulder.” He has a good head on those massive shoulders (and a weird little cap, but whatever, I don’t understand the climate there). He has a smokin’ hot wife who has some anger issues and who I am DEFINITELY not secretly in love with, and the two of them have some pretty adorable kids that I’m sure we will come back around to. Anyway, Pacha has been summoned to the imperial city because (though Pacha doesn’t know it yet) Kuzco has decided to build some sort of Incan Howard Johnson with a waterslide right where Pacha’s house is, but first he wants Pacha to tell him what side of the mountain gets the most sun. 

This is what Canadian resource extraction companies call “community consultation,” and they do it in so-called Latin America right now, except they don’t even build fun pools there. They just raze people’s homes, make the land unfarmable, and dig massive, poisonous pits that are operated with fewer labour standards than Kuzco’s imperial palace. And then they use the wealth they’ve forcibly extracted from the land to build their own pools in shitholes like Toronto and Vancouver. 

Anyway, Pacha has been community consulted and given free, prior and informed consent for the action in the sense that he was told what was going to happen prior to it happening and the consultation ended before he could express dissent. None of this is even vaguely relevant to the way that colonizers operate in the world today and it’s honestly pretty weird that I would even bring it up.

Let’s just get that out of the way. Anthony Easton via Flickr

Yzma is very obviously a talented chemist, and it’s unfortunate that she’s found herself doing largely administrative tasks during her employment at the imperial palace, but that’s the life of an academic these days: you fight the admin until you become the admin, and the learning falls to the wayside. So anyway, Yzma decides she’s going to murder Kuzco (who apparently has no family, and no heirs, which is, again, sus) and take over as emperor. And I mean, she’s no Lenin, and she essentially seems to plan to rule in the exact same way as Kuzco, but I’m always here for the overthrow of an emperor. Yzma invites Kuzco over for dinner, which is thoughtful, but also she wants to kill him which, I mean, I get it, but don’t kill your boss. It’s a morally neutral thing to do, since he’s eventually going to kill you through your labour and the two of you are endlessly locked in a life or death battle, but form a union or have a revolution or something. Murdering one guy isn’t going to give you the systemic changes you desire, Yzma. 

Anyway, none of that matters because it’s quickly discovered that rather than killing Kuzco, they’ve turned him into a llama. It takes Kuzco like, a super long time to figure out he’s a llama, and honestly I would consider this a plothole, but since the film is directed at nine year olds and, as our favourite abusive mother would say, “It’s not Ibsen,” I will let this one go (if I were turned into a llama I would notice IMMEDIATELY). Anyway, Kronk knocks the llama out with a frying pan, shoves him in a sack, and then has a crisis of conscience before he can drown him and so puts him on the back of a peasants  cart. In an INSANE TWIST that no one saw coming, Pacha takes Kuzco back to the village. In a sack. 

The Emperor’s New Groove is a Disney movie, and it’s doubtful that the filmmakers set out to tell a story that was critical of imperialism in the global South, or the dispossession of Indigenous people and people of colour as a whole (I say this because when Disney *tries* to send some kind of ethical message, they make fucking sure we know about it). But intentional or not, it’s done a fair job - FOR WHAT IT IS - of doing that. Pacha is Indigenous, he lives in the home that he grew up in, his children’s heights are marked in the doorframe right next to Pacha’s own. Their community hugs tightly to the hill that it is built on. They’re the answer to the loathsome question that gets asked of people who live in “bad” neighbourhoods or in countries ravaged by war or climate change, places that must, necessarily, be sacrificed for “the good of the whole”: why don’t they just leave? But of course, they can’t leave. This is home and homeland, this is who they are as people, their ancestors built those homes and their remains have become the ground. It’s not a place you can walk away from, not for a silly little waterslide, but not for more than that, either. Kuzco, whose perception of the lands of his empire as parcels of property to be divided up and done with as he pleases, has no roots. He doesn’t know what home is, or why it’s valuable. But of course he’s a llama now, so that probably means he’s about to learn a life lesson or two! 

Homelands. Alex Birrell

Pacha and Kuzco end up on this camping journey back to the imperial palace to change Kuzco back into a llama. For some reason Pacha doesn’t immediately extract a promise that Kuzco will not destroy his village, which is really irritating because he has all the bargaining power here! None of these people have read theory and it shows. Like Verso has a sale every week practically. There’s just no excuse. Eventually Pacha is able to bargain for his village on the condition he return Kuzco to the palace, but with no witnesses, not notaries, and no signed contract, the promise is pretty feeble and we should all be prepared for it to be broken. On the trip, Kuzco is a terrible, useless, and whiny companion to Pacha’s resourceful, can-do-itness, and I really relate to Pacha here because as someone who is a terrible, useless, and whiny companion on camping trips, I have endless sympathy for those who have to put up with me and people like me. Together, the two of them get into a series of physical challenges that are basically trust exercises people at Fortune 500 companies have to do on corporate wellness retreats. The important thing is that none of those exercises actually make their bond sustainably stronger, so consider that the next time you’re trying to plan a coporate WeLLnEsS retreat.

Meanwhile, back at the palace our B-story is unfolding. Yzma has declared Kuzco dead, she’s declared herself emperor, and all the Kuzco-head ornaments have vanished, to be replaced with Yzma head ornaments. For the peasants, nothing will fundamentally change. Almost immediately we (and Yzma) find out that Kronk didn’t kill Kuzco (Puddy couldn’t have done it either) and they launch their own zany adventure to track down llama king and murder him. Kronk and Yzma have what I call a “C-Suite BDSM” relationship, where there’s no sex, but she absolutelu has stepped on his asshole in a high-heeled shoe. He carts her around on his enormous shoulders in a little canopy tent and seems to get a real sick thrill out of it. I see you Kronk. Give me a call sometime. 

The build to the film’s climax begins when both pairs of roamers arrive at a greasy spoon that is inexplicably in the middle of the Peruvian Amazonia and run by a woman who looks like she recently placed last in an I Love Lucy lookalike contest. She steals every scene she’s in and if it weren’t for the fact that she’s just an illustration I would right now be starting a campaign to have her in every movie. Anyway, there’s one of those wacky scenes where everyone is just missing each other by a second, which is a style I’m certain has a name that I would know if I had taken film instead of literature, although if I had taken film instead of literature I would never have gone to class, so I probably still wouldn’t know. Ultimately, Pacha (rightfully) abandons Kuzco at the restaurant, and Kuzco overhears Yzma and Kronk plotting to kill him, and alas, our problematic hero has ears to hear the truth. 

I won’t step-by-step the rest because this is already long, but basically it ends with Kuzco learning a valuable lesson and being turned back into a human, Yzma turned into a kitten, and Kronk teaching Pacha’s two kids how to speak Chipmunk, which doesn’t really seem like a language that will get them into any of the good schools, but whatever.

I give this movie four stars.