Media theorist and educator Neil Postman was deeply worried about the value of so-called educational programming. Rely on TV to teach children, Postman argued in his landmark 1985 work, and the lesson they will really learn is that for anything to be worthwhile, first it has to be entertaining.
I will leave it to you to debate whether Postman was a Luddite or a prophet, but in any case no one ever heeded his warning. One of the purest distillations of the sense-blurring edutainment he worried about was, a 2000-2008 cartoon show that made its didacticism utterly essential to its attention-capturing, at least in the sense that it kept kids watching by keeping them yelling answers at the screen.
Although it’s not just Dora’s constant chipperness that is handled like an unfortunate side effect of having to watch her on screen: More or less everything that made cartoon Dorais primarily fodder for the third of the movie that feels like something between group therapy for parents who twitch involuntary whenever six-year-olds repeat Spanish words, and the screenwriters trolling the executive who wanted to extend the brand recognition of an almost two-decade-old bilingual children’s program...
, but where those inhuman characters were only ostensibly child-focused, and came with a certain amount of knowing weariness sewed-in, Dora is pretty much lost in the woods the instant you point out how ridiculous everything about her is –: a talking backpack, monkey and map – which happens about two minutes in, with a joke about her asking a non-existent audience to repeat after her.
This would be easier to stomach if the film could at least swallow its parental exasperation at singing absurdly literal songs enough to capture any sense of adventure or wonder in what is supposed to be a rip-roaring jungle adventure. Outside of one panorama of an otherworldly field of flowers, the jungle here is mostly resplendently dead, and plodded through like a weary parent reading a bedtime book for the 600th time.