Team Experience is revisiting the movies of 2000 as we approach Thursday's Smackdown
by Nick Taylor
Is it even worth arguing that The Emperor’s New Groove is the last great animated comedy Disney has made? They’ve certainly made funny movies since then, but have they done anything as purely interested in being funny, let alone made a film that finds so many different ways to be that? Especially given the hellish status of its production history and patently lower budget as a result of all that mess, the success of The Emperor's New Groove is legitimately miraculous (I will not be going over that fraught history in any detail here, but please do check out The Sweatbox, the documentary of the production made by Sting’s wife Trudie Styler). Yes, sometimes it can feel a bit cheap if you look too close or stare too long, but the buoyant colors and unabashedly cartoony style give its absurd silliness exactly the right spring in its step. It’s the film the comedic parts of Hercules wishes it could be, or if the Robin Williams parts of were Aladdin stretched into a whole feature, nailing a culture and era-specific setting and form stylized art that’s somehow in sync with a thoroughly modern comedic sensibility. Coming in at a brisk 78 minutes, you get the feeling of a film that’s packed as many jokes into itself as possible while being exactly as long as it needs to be, walking away with an incredible laugh-per-minute ratio.
What feels even surer is that The Emperor’s New Groove has the last great villains to grace a Disney animated film since it debuted...
I’m sure we all have our favorites, especially if we broaden that question out to other Disney media formats, but I have a hard time imagining anyone else really claiming my personal top spot. Of course the muscular, goofy, morally conflicted Kronk deserves all the plaudits in the world, but we’re here for the glory that is Yzma, and Eartha Kitt’s delicious, indelible performance.
The Emperor’s New Groove, as I’m guessing many of you know, is about a hideously self-absorbed Incan emperor named Kuzco (David Spade). For his eighteenth birthday, Kuzco has decided to build himself a summer home/water park on top of the hilltop village of a peasant named Pacha (John Goodman), inviting the man to his palace only to inform him that the guy’s entire town is about to go bye-bye. Right before this, he fires his long-standing advisor Yzma (Eartha Kitt) for the small crime of attempting to rule the empire when he’s not looking. Only the two of them and her beefy, himbo assistant Kronk (Patrick Warburton) know about her dismissal, and Yzma decides to retaliate by poisoning Kuzco with a concoction crafted in her secret lab under the palace, allowing her to become empress before anyone even learns she was canned. However, Kronk mixes up her potions and accidentally turns Kuzco into a llama. After knocking the emperor unconscious and stuffing him in a sack, Kronk is tasked with taking him out of town and killing him, only to accidentally drop the sack in Pacha’s cart during a crisis of conscience and lose track of it. While Yzma and Kronk hunt him down through the jungle, Pacha helps lead Kuzco back to the palace while desperately trying to teach him to care about other people.
Part of what makes Yzma's villainy so exciting first requires carving out a bit of negative space, since I don’t view Kitt's achievement as taking one of the many well-charted paths to giving a standout voice performance in an animated movie. This is surely the kind of success that's more about her being good in a movie that supports and enhances that goodness, rather than powering through a project with some visible flaws. The Emperor’s New Groove isn’t so tonally uneven that Yzma’s characterization and Kitt’s performance constitute a blast of clarity from within a somewhat muddled film (though boy does she understand the tone perfectly). There’s no room for improv, or for her persona to overtly shape her role and how we respond to it. She doesn’t get a kickass musical number, though I do encourage everyone to check out the recordings for “Snuff Out the Light” that Kitt did for Kingdom of the Sun, the original, abandoned version of the film. Compare the Yzma we get to her first draft, which made her a vain witch trying to stay young forever by blotting out the sun, and you can see the ways The Emperor’s New Groove reorganized and simplified certain elements of her personality. But the Sweatbox footage also reveals how fully in the groove Kitt was from minute one, soldiering through each rewrite with a terrific sense of Yzma's theatricality and mad scientist determination.
She also isn’t implying dimensions to Yzma that aren’t already drawn in. Dale Baer, who stepped in late as supervising animator for her after Andrea Dejas left the project as part of the mass exodus in solidarity with Roger Allers, redesigned Yzma into the angular, stunningly skeletal woman we know today. For all the jokes about her appearance - and with her corpulent gray skin those gags are certainly earned - she’s the most visually engaging part of the movie, with her huge eyes, skull-like face, and stick-thin body, always dressed in purple and black with the occasional pink accent. Yzma moves like a Chuck Jones character, so inherently expressive in her face and gesticulations that her every action feels big and entertainingly communicative even when she’s standing still or listening to someone else. In many interviews and in The Sweatbox, Baer talks about taking inspiration from Kitt’s robust physicality during her recording sessions, very often incorporating her hand gestures into Yzma’s final animations.
All this to say that Kitt and Baer are as synched in realizing their character as any duet of animator and performer you'll ever have the pleasure to witness. Both of them are clearly having a ball with Yzma, and the inventive glee feels apparent in their work. You could take each of their contributions separately and glory at the way Kitt savors her lines, or marvel at how fun Baer makes it to watch Yzma scowl and cackle through the picture.
And yet, why on earth would you want to deny yourself any element of Yzma’s perfectly realized characterization? Kitt gifts the character with a delightfully bonkers energy that reveals more intent and modulation behind her choices every time I watch it, knowing how to swerve between different registers of familiarity, boredom, narcissism, and anger at a moment’s notice. There’s a fantastic sense of when to escalate her deliveries. At this very moment I’d say the way she goes from the acquiescing tone of “Alright, a quick cup of coffee,” only to bellow out “THEN TAKE HIM OUT OF TOWN AND FINISH THE JOB!!!!” is her single best beat in the whole film, but you could pull any of her deliveries and find equally riotous material. What makes her voice acting even better is how the animation matches her inflection for inflection, as Yzma finally accepts the offer of coffee from Kronk after mulling it over only to contort her face in anger and go beat red, completely overwhelming the frame with her gnashing teeth and wide eyes. Every swoop and pause in her voice is perfectly complemented by the animators, and the final result is endlessly thrilling.
Kitt's also a wonderful ballast to Warburton’s more deadpan second-banana humor, which hews to an intentionally limited style that's still packed with a lot of wit and color. Frankly, all of the main players contribute funny, resourceful performances, and if Warburton’s work is every bit as surprising and funny as Kitt’s, the combination of actress and animator handily tips Yzma into being my very favorite part of the film As drawn by Baer and acted by Kitt, Yzma is a way, way nuttier presence than anyone else in the film, and Kitt delivers this singular edge in a way that’s still completely of a piece with the ridiculous screwball humor that makes The Emperor’s New Groove so durably entertaining. By tilting into the mad scientist kitsch and empress ambitions, she even gives the character a vivid competency in her plot to kill Kuzco and take over the throne. Whether she’s art-directing a palatial redecorating in her image or ordering guards to kill some intruders, there’s real authority to her, which makes her wild inability to catch one llama and some dude even funnier.
As per the status of these companion pieces I generally do for the Smackdown (only one this time I'm afraid), I’d be happy to advocate for Eartha Kitt’s wickedly bonkers turn for her own Supporting Actress trophy. I’m certainly jazzed she won an Annie Award that year. But even more than that, I’d want to campaign for her and Baer to get their own joint Special Achievement Award, as their combined effort and inspiration feels genuinely essential to make Yzma such a uniquely memorable creation. To call their work one-of-a-kind only feels like a stretch because Kitt would go on to reprise the role for direct-to-DVD films and a TV series that etched a couple more perfect line readings into my brian, winning two more Annies and two Emmys in the process. It’s a genuinely iconic performance, where every line reading just kills no matter how many times you’ve seen it. You could probably get as many laughs from some joke compilation, but why on Earth wouldn’t you just pop in The Emperor’s New Groove and enjoy her in all divine 78 minutes of context? What’s stopping you from giving yourself the gift of Eartha Kitt?
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