By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
For better or for worse, Disney mostly has the market cornered when it comes to animated musicals, so if you don’t love the musical stylings of films movies like Frozen or Moana, you’re out of luck. Once upon a time, though, a different studio altogether put out one of the best animated musicals in film history, one that has only grown more popular in the last few years. The movie is The Road to El Dorado, and you can now stream this quirky comedy for yourself on Netflix.
The Road To El Dorado On Netflix
If you’ve never seen The Road to El Dorado, you may need to know what it’s all about before firing up your Netflix account. This film is about the adventures of two charismatic con men on a Quixotic quest for the titular El Dorado, a legendary city of gold. They find the city and are even mistaken for gods, but it turns out that the real treasure of this lost city might be a sexy native woman with an agenda of her own.
Make no mistake: The Road to El Dorado has a better cast than most animated films on Netflix, starting with Kevin Kline (best known for A Fish Called Wanda and Wild Wild West) as one of the con men in question. His partner in crime is voiced by Kenneth Branagh (best known as an actor for Hamlet and Murder on the Orient Express), and the woman who rounds out their gleesome threesome is voiced by Rosie Perez (best known for White Men Can’t Jump and Fearless). Other voices include animation legends Jim Cummings and Frank Welker as well as musical icon Elton John.
While The Road to El Dorado is a Netflix tale about finding a city of gold, it didn’t find much wealth at the box office. The movie earned $76.4 million against a budget of $95 million, making this a certified box office bomb. Because of this, we never got a sequel to this film, though gamers were able to recreate the adventures of the film via video game adaptations on PC, PlayStation, and Game Boy Color.
Critics, unfortunately, were no kinder to The Road to El Dorado than general audiences. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a low critical score of 50 percent. In general, critics complained that the film had too little story and too little characterization to keep things engaging.
So, like our two adventurers trying to find hidden wealth, you’re probably searching for an answer to a major question: if The Road to El Dorado was a box office bomb that got panned by critics, why the heck am I imploring you to stream it on Netflix? For one thing, the film won over some very notable critics at the time. This includes the late, great Roger Ebert, who gave it 3 out of 4 stars and declared that the movie was “bright and has good energy, and the kinds of witty asides that entertain the adults in between the margins of the stuff for the kids.”
For another thing, audiences have always loved the movie, as evidenced by the (relatively) higher Rotten Tomatoes audience score. The Road to El Dorado currently has a 66 percent audience score via the site’s Popcornmeter, indicating that while not many general audiences have watched the film, it has won over pretty much everyone who has. And more people have seen the movie than ever before thanks to the advent of streaming.
Since The Road to El Dorado began streaming on platforms like Netflix, it has grown ever more popular, becoming something of a late-blooming cult hit. If you doubt this, just look at the sheer number of GIFs and memes that have been made of this decades-old movie (like, how many times a week do you see the animated meme of the two characters asking “Both?” “Both”). Nostalgia for the film is high among the very demographic it was made for (millennials), and there’s no time like the present to check it out for yourself.
Will you enjoy The Road To El Dorado as much I did when you find it on Netflix, or will you think the film is as much of a con as its heroes? You won’t know until you check it out for yourself. Come for the fun premise and killer voicework and stay for the deliciously dirty jokes slipped into the film for adults who have grown tired of Disney’s smoothly inoffensive mode of singing animal storytelling.
