Dora And The Lost City Of Gold (2019) - Movie Review

While most of my cartoon diet as a kid was largely populated by the works of Cartoon Network, Dora The Explorer is something that kept popping up when my after-school hours were taken up largely by old-school Flash gaming. In-between side-scrollers about schoolkid secret agents and motion comics based on Lego properties, I played through a few games featuring one of Nickelodeon’s premium characters and caught a handful of moments from the TV show proper.

Knowing how endlessly goofy the framing for the show is, adapting to the big screen was going to be a challenge for just about any filmmaker. Thankfully, this is an adaptation that manages to work as cinematic spectacle without losing touch of what made the series so long-lasting.

Between out-doing the adults at their own game in Sicario: Day Of The Soldado and an outright fantastic turn in Instant Family, Isabella Moner has been raring for a starring role for a while now, and it’s an opportunity that she grabs with both hands. Whether she’s trying to maintain a happy-go-lucky attitude amidst the defeatism of high school, letting her inner jungle wanderer run wild or selling action scenes that make her look like the successor of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones, she nails every moment given, even when the writing seems to hold her back. Writer Matthew Robinson’s last credited work was with Monster Trucks, so Dude knows that co-writer Nicholas Stoller had to help balance things out, something he seems to have quite adequately.

And then there’s the direction by James Bobin, who’s been slowly but steadily making a name for himself as a reliable figure for entertaining, if not always coherent, family-friendly entertainment. His and DOP Javier Aguirresarobe’s visual flair ends up muted once we enter the high school setting, a bit of head-scratching narrative development when all is said and done, but once things move south of the border, they create a suitably cartoonish but earthily wondrous as we see Dora and company traversing through increasingly booby-trapped jungles, caves and temples.

As for adapting the original TV series, this film takes what is probably the best method possible: It actively points at the more memetic aspects of the show and gives it some loving pokes. The frequent and inexplicable musical numbers (Bobin’s experience directing the newer Muppet films serves him well here), the direct talking to an audience that may or may not even be there, the random factoids to do with nature and the Spanish dialect; the film lets these tropes work in a feature-length frame while also acknowledge the bleeding obvious, that being their inherent peculiarity. Link here to one of the bigger examples that springs to mind.

The sense of humour here is unashamedly kid-friendly, to the point where jokes about things that sound like farts and a literal pooping song serve as the main watermarks for the overall tone. It likely will work with the intended younger audience than it would with older cinematic completionists such as myself (could say that about most things, to be fair), but it doesn’t reach the point where I actively dreading sitting through it for any length of time. The fourth-wall breakers definitely helped with it, as do Dora’s winning personality and embodiment of adventure alongside the weirdly cute and jarringly-Danny-Trejo-voiced monkey Boots. Oh, and the drug trip sequence that returns to more traditional Dora-style animation.

When all is said and done, I have to admit, this was pretty fun. For every tone and visual style it aims for, it manages to pull off rather nicely, the performances may be attached to somewhat thin characters but still work within those means, and as a more family-friendly depiction of the globe-trotting adventurer, it works as a nice bit of progression beyond what Indy established as the norm. The main explorer’s conceit may be a little difficult to take seriously (I mean, "maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way" is a line typically used to mock films like this), but the delivery definitely makes it stick better than one would expect. Here’s hoping that Isabella sticks around for a bit longer, as her presence on-screen is becoming more and more of a delight with each passing feature.