Dora And The Lost City Of Gold Behind The Scenes [better] [ iPad ]
When the first trailer for Dora and the Lost City of Gold dropped, the internet did a double-take. This wasn’t the gentle, fourth-wall-breaking cartoon from Nickelodeon. This was a live-action jungle romp with quicksand, ancient booby traps, and a surprisingly sharp wit. How do you take a seven-year-old cartoon icon and turn her into a feature film for teenagers and nostalgic adults? We went behind the scenes to find out. Casting the Ultimate Optimist The biggest challenge was finding Dora. She had to be relentlessly positive, fiercely intelligent, and completely sincere—without being annoying. Enter Isabela Moner (now known as Isabela Merced).
“We mixed two tons of rolled oats, water, and green food coloring in a tank,” reveals special effects coordinator J.D. Schwalm. “It has the exact viscosity of quicksand—slow to sink in, but impossible to move quickly.”
The cast spent three days in the oatmeal pit. Eugenio Derbez (Alejandro) had a particularly bad time when his character gets submerged. “It got in my ears, my nose, every crevice,” Derbez laughs. “But the smell? We smelled like breakfast for a week.” The behind-the-scenes story of Dora and the Lost City of Gold is one of risk. It could have been a cheap nostalgia cash-grab. Instead, director James Bobin and his team made a conscious choice: respect the source material, but never mock it. They built real sets, embraced practical effects, and cast a lead who understood that Dora’s greatest superpower isn’t her map or her backpack—it’s her relentless, joyful confidence. dora and the lost city of gold behind the scenes
“We wanted Boots to feel like a real animal, not a cartoon sidekick,” says Bobin. “But for the dream sequences and a very special hallucination scene, we brought in a Jim Henson Company puppet. That puppet was so expressive, the actors started performing to it like a real co-star.”
“It was chaos,” laughs co-star Jeffrey Wahlberg (Diego). “Isabela would be giving this heroic speech, and then a mechanical flower would sneeze powder in her mouth. We had to do, like, forty takes because we kept breaking character.” One of the biggest behind-the-scenes questions was: How do you handle Boots? In the cartoon, Boots is a talking monkey. In a live-action film, a talking monkey felt... risky. The solution? Boots is a real, trained monkey for most of the film (a cheeky capuchin named Baby), but he doesn’t talk. Instead, Dora interprets his chattering. When the first trailer for Dora and the
That hallucination scene—where Boots suddenly speaks in the voice of Danny Trejo—became an instant legend on set. Trejo recorded his lines in a booth, but the crew played his voice over speakers while a puppeteer operated a wide-eyed, deadpan Boots puppet. Merced admits she couldn’t stop laughing. “Seeing Danny Trejo’s face on a tiny monkey puppet is the hardest I’ve ever worked to keep a straight face.” Swiper the fox also got a gritty upgrade. In the film, he’s not a cartoon fox but a masked, stealth-suited jungle trickster (played by actor Benicio Del Toro in a motion-capture suit). The crew nicknamed him “Ninja Swiper.”
To create Swiper’s signature blue-and-black mask, the effects team designed a practical suit covered in subtle blue LEDs. Del Toro would creep through the jungle set, completely silent, while the actors had to react in fear. “He’s this Oscar-winning actor, and he’s full-on sneaking behind a fake bush in a spandex suit, whispering ‘Swiper, no swiping!’” recalls Merced. “It was surreal and amazing.” In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Dora teaches her city-slicker cousin Diego how to escape quicksand. On screen, it looks terrifying. Behind the scenes? It was a giant pool of oatmeal. How do you take a seven-year-old cartoon icon
“I grew up watching her,” Merced revealed on set. “But I wanted to make sure she wasn’t just a cartoon. She’s a kid who has been homeschooled in the jungle by explorer parents. Of course she talks to a monkey and a backpack—that’s her reality.”