In Emperor's New Groove, the movie ends on a high note with a humorous scene featuring Kronk, the lovable comedic relief character teaching a group of scouts (and Yzma, the villain who's been turned into a cat) how to speak "squirrel".
Image courtesy Walt Disney Pictures via IMDB
The scene gets a laugh and ends well, but this feeling quickly dissipates as the end credits appear accompanied by a most subdued musical number performed by Sting. We've seen the film a dozen times, but only once have we sat through the entire end credits, and that was because we had to for research for this blog post.
We think Sting and his music is world class, and so must Disney because they hired him to create the soundtrack for this film. The song in question, My Funny Friend and Me, was even nominated for an Academy Award. But the making of The Emperor's New Groove was not without its troubles. Director Roger Allers (The Lion King) quit the film half way through, and the story was completely rewritten with new director Mark Dindal in charge. Sting's songs, related to specific scenes that were now gone, all had to be dropped--except one. It seems to us that My Funny Friend and Me might have been created for a possible montage scene in the story. Instead, it was thrown over the credit roll. It unfortunately fails to maintain the jovial feeling created in Kronk's last scene and thus sends the audience from their seats to the exits sooner than it should have.
This is an example of how corporate dictates interfered with artistic ones, and as a result the closing credits leave you feeling flat and uninterested.
Tomorrow, we'll examine how the creators of Enchanted did things a bit differently.
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