Dora and the Lost City of Gold Is a Hidden Treasure
What does it actually mean to adapt "uncinematic" IP?
Every so often a film comes along that is far better than its premise has any right to be, and Dora and the Lost City of Gold is one of them.
It's a hidden treasure. It knows exactly what it is, it never tries to be anything else, and it never apologises for a second of it. The acting, the story and the casting are all on point, and Isabela Merced does something genuinely difficult, she plays the straight man in a comedy that is entirely about her.
I want to talk about why, because from where I sit, as someone who has spent a lifetime developing and producing film and television, this movie is one of the most instructive adaptations of the last decade.
The numbers back up the claim. It sits at 85% with critics and 88% with verified audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, which is unusually strong for a live-action film built on preschool IP. Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com put her finger on the reason, the film stays faithful to Dora while affectionately teasing the absurdity of the world she comes from.
But the numbers aren't the interesting part. The decision-making is.
The masterstroke. Dora isn't the joke
There was an incredibly easy version of this film available to everyone involved. Dora is ridiculous. She's relentlessly cheerful, she talks to the camera, she sings instructional songs, she carries a talking backpack, and she's pursued by a masked kleptomaniac fox. Isn't that stupid?
That movie is funny for twenty minutes and unbearable for the following eighty.
James Bobin and writers Nicholas Stoller and Matthew Robinson make a far smarter choice. The world thinks Dora is ridiculous. The movie never does. That distinction is the whole film.
Dora walks into an American high school behaving exactly like Dora the Explorer. She smiles at strangers, introduces herself with total enthusiasm, speaks Spanish, sings, asks questions constantly, and appears to have no capacity for embarrassment whatsoever. Everyone thinks she's insane, and for a while the audience laughs along with them.
Then the film quietly reverses the joke. Dora isn't slow. She's multilingual, intellectually curious, and fluent in archaeology, zoology, navigation and survival. She's brave, empathetic, and doesn't panic. The supposedly sophisticated teenagers around her turn out to be the ones badly equipped for the world.
What the film does over ninety minutes is transform Dora's defining trait from naïveté into radical sincerity. That is sophisticated writing by any standard, and remarkable in a children's movie.
Isabela Merced is the movie
The concept collapses without her. Merced has to play complete sincerity inside a comedy, which is one of the hardest things you can ask a young actor to do. She can't wink at the camera. The moment she signals yes, I know Dora is absurd, the character dies and the film dies with it.
Instead she commits entirely. RogerEbert.com compared her to Amy Adams in Enchanted, and that's exactly right. Adams never played Giselle as a joke. Merced never plays Dora as one. The Los Angeles Times made a similar point about how precisely she walks the line between sincere and silly.
The result is that lovely comic inversion I mentioned. Dora is the straight man in a world convinced she's the crazy person. And Merced is enormously charismatic with it. She's funny without ever "doing comedy", it's in the facial expressions, the physical commitment, the almost weaponised enthusiasm.
The whole film depends on you walking out thinking I kind of wish I were more like her. Somehow it gets you there.
Affection, not parody
This is where Bobin's work on The Muppets pays off. He understands affectionate self-awareness, which is a much rarer skill than it sounds.
The movie acknowledges everything strange about the source material.
Dora addresses an audience nobody else can see. Swiper is, for no stated reason, a talking fox in a mask. Boots is a monkey. The backpack is treated as a matter of enormous importance. Songs arrive at wildly inappropriate moments, and characters occasionally react the way a real person would.
What the film never says is that your childhood was stupid. What it says instead is, yes, this was weird, and we loved it too. The Observer's review, drew the Enchanted parallel as well. Drop a picture-book character into something like reality, invite us to laugh at her, then change our minds about her.
That's a very good tonal model for anyone handling legacy children's IP.
The genre pivot is the structural trick
The screenplay opens as Dora × Mean Girls and then becomes Dora × Indiana Jones, and that isn't arbitrary. It's a competence inversion (although I wish it had stayed as Dora × Mean Girls a little longer).
At school, Dora is the fish out of water. In the jungle, everyone else is. Diego spends the first act embarrassed by her because she doesn't understand his world, and then he's dropped into hers. We learn that Dora isn't socially inept at all. She's culturally displaced, which is a far more interesting thing to be.
Once they're in the jungle, everything that made her strange becomes useful. Her curiosity reads as intelligence, her optimism as resilience, her knowledge as survival, her cheerfulness as leadership. It's a genuinely satisfying character mechanism, and it's the kind of thing you only get when someone has thought hard about structure and their audience rather than just gags.
And then it commits to being an adventure film
Here's the other thing I admire. It doesn't stop at spoofing Indiana Jones. At a certain point the film decides it is going to be an Indiana Jones movie for nine-year-olds, and it commits… hard.
Temples, traps, puzzles, quicksand, ancient civilisations, treasure hunters, secret passages, a betrayal, a climactic archaeological set piece.
Production designer Dan Hennah, whose credits include The Lord of the Rings, gives it a tangible, old-fashioned quality that a lot of contemporary family filmmaking lacks. TheWrap picked up the echoes of The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
That lineage of the creatives and the film itself matters, because the live-action family adventure is a genre Hollywood barely makes anymore. Not animated, not superhero, not relentlessly ironic. Just kids going on an enormous adventure. There's a straight line from The Goonies through Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Spy Kids, National Treasure and Jumanji, and Dora understands that particular pleasure.
It also allows itself to be stupid
Which is not at all the same as being badly written.
The quicksand sequence is ridiculous. The poop song is ridiculous. The hallucinogenic flowers are ridiculous (but one of my favorite parts tbh). Danny Trejo voicing Boots is ridiculous. Benicio del Toro voicing Swiper might be my favourite casting decision in any recent children's film.
All of it gives the movie something increasingly rare in expensive franchise filmmaking. Personality.
There's an anarchic streak running underneath a conventional studio adventure. The Observer called it goofily charming and singled out the psychedelic sequence that turns the characters briefly back into cartoons.
That animated sequence is smarter than it looks, because it's doing four things at once. A gag, fan service, a stylistic break, and an acknowledgement that somewhere underneath these live-action people are the original cartoon characters. That's real filmmaking.
Dora is a remarkably good protagonist for children
This may be the film's biggest achievement. Consider what her superpowers actually are. Not magic, not violence, not wealth, not beauty, not popularity. Curiosity, knowledge, optimism, empathy, courage and competence.
And the film never apologises for her intelligence, which matters especially because Dora is a teenage girl. She isn't the smart girl who's socially miserable, or the sarcastic girl, or the beautiful girl who turns out to be secretly clever, or the chosen one. She simply likes learning things, and the movie treats that as heroic.
Common Sense Media lists teamwork, communication, compassion, courage, curiosity and perseverance among its central themes, which is an unusually healthy set of values for a family adventure. Related to that, and possibly my favourite thing about the screenplay, is it refuses to make Dora cool.
Most development processes eventually produce that note. Give her a leather jacket. More sarcasm. Have her be embarrassed by her younger self. Lose the backpack. Give her a makeover. Let Diego teach her how teenagers behave. Thank God nobody won that argument, because the entire film argues that Dora doesn't need fixing, the world around her needs to become slightly more Dora-like.
She never completes the standard teen-movie arc from weird girl to socially acceptable girl. She goes from weird girl to still weird, but everyone finally understands why she's great. That's a much better message and a much harder one to protect through development.
The parents, and why the character holds together
Michael Peña and Eva Longoria could easily have been generic exposition delivery. Instead they're charming, eccentric and entirely believable as the two people who could have produced this child.
There's a lovely idea underneath it. Dora is secure because she was loved. Her confidence isn't ego, it's the product of parents who encouraged curiosity. That makes her optimism psychologically coherent rather than cartoonish. She isn't oblivious because she's dumb, she just assumes the world is interesting rather than threatening.
That's a beautiful foundation for a character, and it's the sort of thing that keeps a comic premise from feeling weightless.
There's even a serious idea in here about archaeology
The film keeps distinguishing explorers from treasure hunters. It plays as a throwaway joke early on, and then it becomes the moral architecture of the whole thing. The villain sees discovery as ownership. Dora sees discovery as understanding. That's a pointed correction to the traditional Indiana Jones model, and even the Washington Post's largely negative review acknowledged the film's willingness to engage with colonialism and the removal of cultural artefacts.
For a Nickelodeon adventure movie, that's thoughtful.
The adaptation strategy is the real lesson
From an executive perspective, this is the part I find most instructive. The filmmakers correctly identified three audiences and built a layer for each.
Current children need adventure, comedy, spectacle and characters they can follow. Older kids who grew up with the show need the film to acknowledge that Dora now looks absurd. Parents need enough wit and craft to survive the runtime.
So children see Dora going on an adventure. Teenagers see that Dora is hilariously weird. Adults see that the filmmakers know perfectly well she's hilariously weird. And all three groups arrive at the same place. Dora is actually kind of awesome. That is genuinely sophisticated four-quadrant filmmaking.
Underneath that sits the most important question in any adaptation. A lesser version asks what elements of the brand audiences recognise, backpack, Boots, Swiper, map, purple shirt, songs, Spanish. That's iconography, and iconography is packaging.
Bobin and his writers asked the better question, what do people actually love about Dora? The answer is her worldview. That the world is fascinating, problems can be solved, knowledge is valuable, people can work together, other cultures are worth understanding, fear shouldn't stop curiosity, and adventures are fun.
That's the IP. Everything else is decoration.
Where it falls short
I agree with one recurring criticism, the high-school section may be stronger than the jungle section. RogerEbert.com made essentially that argument, that there was enough comic material in Dora navigating Los Angeles that the film didn't need to hurry back into conventional adventure territory. The Washington Post went further and felt the tonal shifts never cohered at all.
I understand both reactions. The first act contains the film's most original idea. What if Dora the Explorer had to survive high school and once we reach the jungle the storytelling becomes more familiar.
Overall here is my scorecard for one of my favorite films of the past 10 years: screenplay 8, direction 8, casting 9, Isabela Merced 10, production design 8.5, comedy 8.5, adventure 8, adaptation of IP 9.5. Call it 8.5 overall.
But there's one category where I'd give it a flat 10, and it's the category that matters most. Understanding what movie it should be. That is rarer to find in Hollywood than any of the other categories.
They could have made Dora cynical. They could have made it embarrassed by its source. They could have shot a literal live-action recreation of the cartoon, or made something exclusively for five-year-olds. Instead they made a funny, sincere, slightly surreal, old-fashioned family adventure about the radical power of being enthusiastic about the world.
That's why it has aged as well as it has.
If I were teaching an adaptation class to development executives, I'd put Dora and the Lost City of Gold on the syllabus alongside The Lego Movie, Barbie, The Muppets and Enchanted, because they all follow the same rule for adapting supposedly uncinematic IP.
Don't apologise for the thing people loved. Find the deeper reason they loved it, build the film around that, and then be smart enough to laugh at everything else.
Dora does exactly that.
If you haven’t seen this film because you thought it was going to be a silly kids flick, watch it, and I promise you’ll have a great time. Can you say good time? LOL!
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