The Road to El dorado is a 2000 film by the prestigious producer Dreamworks. Set in the bloody conquest of Mexican lands today, the work revolves around the history of two “Spanish adventurers” who head to the police on the boat of Hernán Cortés that will conquer and plunder Mexico.

The film is full of racist clichés and historical-geographical errors. Hernán Cortés hides or shows from a very high point the barbarities provoked in the conquest of Mexico, and although he wants to sell a “peaceful encounter between two worlds”, he tries in a paternalistic way his relationship with the indigenous people. For example, presenting indigenous people, good and bad according to the dichotomy and all as daring to beautify the adventures of white men European protagonists, especially women.

The film about Elkano, released in 2019, is also about another armed expedition related to the Spanish Empire. Repeat the same Eurocentric view of the film on El Dorado. Through Twitter they have also shown how the main characters have been copied.

Although Mexico and the Philippines are thousands of kilometres away, their inhabitants have been represented in almost the same way. An evil indigenous, with a glimpse of anger and a long nose; a good indigenous who develops with the conquerors, smiling and fat; an indigenous woman who falls in love with her protagonist, with the stereotyped body of the woman of the twenty-first century; and the most curious, they too, Tulio and Elkano, seem clones.

Brave and indolent women for children

Although the changes in the male characters they have copied are very small, the development of the indigenous woman who falls in love with her European white protagonist is very significant.

The Pasaitarra director Ángel Alonso has brought the stereotyped body of women to impossible proportions. In addition to the usual “minimalist” clothing, the large ankles of the lips and the almost anorexic thinness, the neck is now as long as the face and the waist and the width of the back have been physically impossible by the producers Debulitoon and Barton Films.

Considering these premises, it is more serious that the two films are created and designed for the children's audience.