The Road to El Dorado is a animated movie from 2000. It is about 2 friends who travel to find El Dorado, "the lost city of gold." Once they find the gold their plan is to get back to Spain as quickly as possible without getting hurt or killed and to live a life of luxury with their newly acquired wealth. (The link to the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138749/) I remember watching this movie as a kid and wondering if El Dorado was a real place...not like a real city made of gold/utopia, but just a regular town that people fantasized about, or if it actually was magical like Atlantis. I had totally forgotten about this until we started reading Candide. Having another viewpoint of El Dorado, I want to go back and watch this Dreamworks animation to see if there are any underlying references to Candide! I love being able to make the connection between a animated movie and a classic work of literature.
2 comments:
OMG TBT
I was gonna blog about this!!! I've seen that movie so many times- and they actually do have many similarities between the movie and Candide. For starters- the way of getting into El Dorado in both formats is by a treacherous looking river- although in the movie it is behind a waterfall. In both everything is basically gold and the element means nothing to the people there- in the movie the people from el dorado think that the two travelers are gods and treat them to every luxury, while in the story they're just super nice people. In both they basically plan on leaving in order to take gold with them and be richer than the Monarchs back home. And in both when they leave with gold- they end up losing all of it. However, in the movie they sacrifice their gold in order to save the people. While candide loses his just by being kinda dumb. I'm not sure if these similarities are just a part of the original myth or not since I wasn't really aware that it was a well known thing until I read this book. I did think it was interesting that both dealt with the theme of how human nature corresponds with how a utopia would work
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