THE TRAIL THEY BLAZED

Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to take a different approach. To a degree, of course, setting up DreamWorks Pictures - the company Katzenberg co-founded with director/ producer Steven Spielberg and entertainment industry mogul David Geffen - went somewhere along the way to doing that: it was structured as an independent outfit but with the resources of a studio (including its own high-power international distribution operation).

When producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and the DreamWorks team set out on The Road to El Dorado, they were determined to do things differently. Eleanor Singer reports.

But one of Katzenberg’s passions has always been animation (in his years at Disney, he had been responsible for, among other films, the epoch-making Lion King), and he was determined to move away from the straight hero/comic sidekick structure that had seemingly always been part of animated films.

Having made these movies for a number of years now,” reflects Katzenberg, “I’ve always thought it would be a great idea to take what would ordinarily be the secondary characters - the dysfunctional losers, the comic relief - and send them off on some big adventure of their own.” Which is precisely what he did on The Road to El Dorado. Working with writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who scripted Aladdin) and the musical team of Elton John, Tim Rice and Hans Zimmer (with whom he collaborated on The Lion King), Katzenberg put his plan into action with the third major DreamWorks animation feature to be released. In the film, a couple of small-time Spanish con men, Tulio (voiced by Kevin Kline) and Miguel (Kenneth Branagh), end up - more by mistake than anything else - discovering the fabulous lost city of El Dorado, where everything is made out of gold. In the process, they not only get within sniffing distance of being fabulously rich: they are also taken for Gods.

The story starts in Spain, where Tulio and Miguel win a map in a game of dice. Like everything else they do, the game is rigged, their opponents discover the loaded dice and, making their escape, Tulio and Miguel end up hiding on board a ship in the harbour. By the time they manage to escape from their hiding places, however, the vessel - which turns out to be the flagship for Cortes’ expedition to conquer the New World - is half-way to America. Locked in the brig by Cortes, Tulio and Miguel manage to escape with the help of an unusually gifted war horse called Altivo.