Aside from Pixar's Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life, Disney's animation arm hasn't produced anything to crow about in the last couple of years.  With The Emperor's New Groove, things may be turning around for the studio.  Perhaps the improvement can be traced to the attempts of Fox, DreamWorks and Warner Bros. to muscle in on the turf that has been exclusively theirs for so long.  Maybe it's because Groove doesn't put the film's animation technique ahead of its story, like it did with Dinosaur and Tarzan.  Or, quite possibly, it's just a fluke.

What we do know is that Groove was originally called Kingdom of the Sun and was created around a half-dozen songs penned and performed by Sting.  The film had the typical Disney romantic subplot, the stock antagonist, the obligatory wacky sidekick and enough talking animals to shake a stick at. In other words, it was just like every other goddamn animated feature the Mouse House has ever produced.  But here comes the surprising part – Disney scrapped most of the story, the romantic angle and almost all of Sting's songs.  The result is the first straight-out Disney comedy to come along in a long, long time.

David Spade (Just Shoot Me) provides the voice of Emperor Kuzco, the young ruler of a kingdom that extends as far as the eye can see.  To say Kuzco is conceited would be an understatement, and this point is driven home in the film's opening scene.  Kuzco dances around his castle (to Sting's "Perfect World," sung by Tom Jones) but is interrupted by one of his villagers.  In a scene straight out of Braveheart, Kuzco tosses the man out the window for throwing off his "groove."  A few moments later, Kuzco tells another villager (John Goodman, Normal, Ohio) he's being evicted from a piece of property that has been in his family for hundreds of years – just so the Emperor can build a summer retreat called "Kuzco-topia."

Kuzco also has an advisor named Yzma (Eartha Kitt), who hatches a plan to bump off her boss and take over his throne.  Together with her big, dumb assistant, Kronk (Patrick Warburton, Putty from Seinfeld), Yzma tries to poison Kuzco but succeeds only in turning the ruler into a llama.  The newly cloven-hoofed Kuzco is put in a sack and dropped in the river, where he meets up with Pacha, the villager he just evicted.  The two begin the long journey back to Kuzco's castle, meeting various adversities along the way.

It would be one thing to have a Disney film devoid of songs, or missing a time-consuming love story, but to have both in the same picture is almost too good to be true.  Groove also features a funny cross-dressing scene (a must for any decent comedy, I suppose) and nods to, among others, Fantasia and The Fly.  But, best of all, it's smart, funny and will be equally enjoyable for adults and children.

Groove is narrated by Spade's character, and the first half of the film is told via flashback (including two occasions where his Kuzco interrupts the story when it's not about him).  The technique wouldn't have worked without Spade (the same way High Fidelity would have been awful without John Cusack).  There was some concern that Spade's Kuzco wouldn't have the same snarky bite we're used to from the pint-sized comedian, but he's just as snide here as he has been anywhere else (thanks to the script from Toy Story/A Bug's Life writer David Reynolds).

Kitt's voice produces one of the most memorable Disney villains in quite some time.  Her Yzma is a cross between Madame Medusa from The Rescuers and the original (read: animated) Cruella De Vil.  Goodman's voice is very subdued here, which is a welcome surprise if you've seen his new television show.  His animated wife is voiced by yet another sitcom star (Spade's Just Shoot Me co-star, Wendie Malick), showing that Disney spared no expense for the film's voice talent, which is absent any feature-film stars.

In case you didn't notice, Groove features the voices of two current and one former player in NBC's powerful "Must See TV" Thursday night lineup (Spade and Malick, and Seinfeld's Warburton).  What's stranger is that these three are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Disney raiding television's most popular evening for voice talent.  Remember ER stars Julianna Margulies and Ming-Na Wen (Dinosaur and Mulan, respectively)?  How about Warburton's fellow Seinfeld co-workers Jason Alexander (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Wayne Knight (Tarzan and Toy Story 2).  Even Hercules was voiced by Tate Donovan, who, at the time, was playing Rachel's boyfriend on Friends.

Next up: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jerry Seinfeld in The Beauty and the Beast 2.

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