Dora and the Lost City of Gold Review

Nickelodeon’s Dora the Explorer is one of the biggest cartoons aimed at pre-school aged children. Her first live-action sees the little girl all grown up for an archaeological adventure.

Dora (Isabela Moner) has grown up in the Amazon rainforest with her professor parents (Michael Peña and Eva Longoria). After one adventure too many her parents decide to send Dora to America so she can socialise with kids her age, forcing the girl to face the horrors of high school. When her parents disappear during an exploration Dora and school friends get kidnapped and sent back to the jungle where they have to find the Lost City of Parapata.

My exposure to Dora the Explorer has been more with parodies then the show itself. Most famously Ariel Winter starred in a parody trailer for College Humor. On the surface Dora and the Lost City of Gold had promise – it was directed by James Bobin who has a good track record making family films and Nicholas Stoller co-wrote the script. This pair previously worked together making the 2011 reboot of The Muppets which was a delightfully hilarious and self-aware film.

Bobin and Stoller brought this self-aware approach for the Dora movie. This starts with the opening credits where the 6-year-old versions of Dora and Diego being on an adventure and it was revealed that the events were taking place in their imaginations. One of Dora’s most famous actions was when she breaks the fourth wall, but when the live-action Dora does it leads to parents wondering who she’s talking to. These type of self-aware jokes were done to appeal both to parents and their children. A particularly enjoyable moment was when some of the characters have a hallucination and turn into their animated counterparts.

Bobin knows how to make a colourful film. His previous two films were testament to that. With Dora and the Lost City of Gold he basically crosses Mean Girls with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The high school drama sees a girl who has had no interaction with people her own age and ends up being mocked by everyone and ignored by her cousin. It chips away from her upbeat personality. In the jungle Dora and her school friends have to survive pass ancient tribes, avoid traps and solve puzzles. It was basically a theme park ride due to the kids sliding around. However, due to the film’s modest budget of $49 million, the CGI for the animal characters weren’t that convincing.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold was clearly aimed towards younger members of the audience. It was a film that wanted to celebrate knowledge and intelligence, the powers of friendship and diversity: positive messages most can agree with. The friendship between the characters grows as they have to work together to survive the perils of the jungle.

However, the film’s humour was also meant for younger children. The worst of this was the scatological jokes that would make most adults groan. Madeleine Madden who played a rival student had one of the most embarrassing moments in her career where she needed to do a poo in the rainforest. The worst incident was when the characters walked on ground that made fart noises, which resulted in a lot of fart jokes. Sammy (Madden) and Alejandro (Eugenio Derbez) were so irritating due to their constant complaining and cowardice that I wanted to jump through the screen to throttle them.

There was some humour geared toward adults but this was few and far between. It stands in contrast to what Bobin and Stoller did with The Muppets where they made a film that had jokes that adults and children could enjoy at the same time like the opening musical number and travelling by map.

I was clearly not the target audience for Dora and the Lost City of Gold, which tempered my enjoyment of the film. Yet it was a harmless film that wanted to spread positive messages to younger children – so hard to begrudge it that much.