Dora and the Lost City of Gold Is Charming, Meta, and Odd

Most of the time, when a preschool animated series gets a movie, it tends to be a mildly longer tale of the same format. But the iconography of Dora the Explorer has turned the character into such a parody that it would be impossible for her to make the jump to live action as anything other than a weird adventure.

Dancing between satire and standard jungle antics, Dora and the Lost City of Gold fits snugly into that odd subgenre of films based on television akin to The Brady Bunch Movie or The Addams Family. Parts of Dora’s peculiar nature are mocked, while other parts of it are just accepted in the weird world she inhabits. This could make the film confounding, but do we really care how a fox bandit can speak?

Isabela Moner stars in Dora and the Lost City of Gold. © 2018 Paramount Players, a Division of Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

Dora of the film is more or less established as the TV character: a little girl who makes up songs, speaks fluent English and Spanish, and constantly talks to the audience. Her parents think it’s a phase, but she’ll grow up to keep teaching and singing as a teenager played by Isabella Moner. Having grown up in the jungle all her life, helping her explorer parents search for a lost Incan city, she is somewhat ill prepared to make the jump to California life as the new student in town. Then again, she might be overprepared, considering she comes to school armed with advanced knowledge of literature and astronomy. And flares.

Moner’s performance is a chipper one that has that same sense of well meaning and innocence reminiscent of Paddington. She has such great energy and enthusiasm for learning that even the distant embarrassment of her cousin Diego (Jeff Wahlberg) and the scathing remarks by the popular girl of the school, Sammy (Madeleine Madden) do little to dampen her flame. Despite Moner being so fantastic in the role, I had my fears that the entire movie would merely be a standard fish-out-of-water story featuring Dora trying to adjust to suburban living, with all the obvious domestication jokes one could make, à la Jungle 2 Jungle. Thankfully, the film takes both a baffling and exciting turn when Dora and a handful of her friends are kidnapped and shipped back to the jungle by some bad guys seeking treasure.

Jeff Wahlberg, Madeleine Madden, and Isabela Moner as Diego, Sammy, and Dora. © 2018 Paramount Players, a Division of Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

Trading in the tale of a wide-eyed Dora being domesticated by cynical teenagers, she is now the energetic adventurer who teaches her pals how not to drown in quicksand. (When was the last time quicksand was used in an adventure film?) Dora’s energy does make this fairly predictable trip through the jungle a charming one, considering how it almost passively strolls through the expected notes of tomb puzzles, ancient treasure, and greedy bad guys who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, in classic Nickelodeon fashion, to make the teens seem more heroic there is the old staging of adults as goofy bumblers. This includes Eugenio Derbez as a pensive cackler and Michael Peña as a stumbling dad who embarrasses Dora with his improv of rave music.

The moments the film hits its highest marks are also the most surreal. Dora’s knack for coming up with songs takes a weird turn when she has to sing about not dying in the jungle. Among the bad guys she encounters, one is the swiping fox Swiper, voiced by Benicio del Toro—an oddity only briefly brought up and quickly accepted, despite Dora’s monkey pal Boots not being able to speak. Well, except for one scene where Danny Trejo briefly takes over the role. Is Dora hallucinating this version of Boots? It’s possible, considering there’s a scene in which Dora and her friends literally become high off spores in the jungle and she has a trippy vision of herself as a cartoon.

Swiper, voiced by Benicio Del Toro. © 2018 Paramount Players, a Division of Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

There’s just enough frenzied meta mayhem within Dora and the Lost City of Gold to forgive its by-the-numbers adventure. A lot of the expected gross-out gags common for Nickelodeon are still present, including plenty of banter about poop for the kids and winking about mating season for the adults. But the heart and soul of the picture, the part that makes any of this work, is Isabella Moner. Only she could sing a song about going to the bathroom in the jungle and make it more charming than foul.

© 2018 Paramount Players, a Division of Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.