City Of Gold Behind The Scenes Best — Dora And The Lost
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.”
Director James Bobin ( The Muppets , Alice Through the Looking Glass ) knew he needed an actress who could handle physical comedy, dramatic moments, and action. Merced trained for weeks in stunt choreography, learning to swing on vines and slide down muddy slopes. But Bobin says her secret weapon was her sincerity. “Isabela never winks at the camera. She plays Dora completely straight. That’s why the jokes land.” While the film takes place in the lush, dangerous Peruvian Amazon, the majority was shot in Cairns, Australia, and on soundstages in Los Angeles. Production designer Mark Tildesley faced a unique puzzle: how to make a fake jungle look real enough for a high-stakes adventure, but vibrant enough to feel like Dora’s world. dora and the lost city of gold behind the scenes
As Merced puts it: “Dora doesn’t get sarcasm. She doesn’t get irony. And in a world full of cynical movies, that’s the most rebellious thing you can be.” “Seeing Danny Trejo’s face on a tiny monkey
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. Merced trained for weeks in stunt choreography, learning
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.
The centerpiece of the behind-the-scenes magic was the titular “Lost City.” Instead of relying entirely on CGI, the team built massive practical sets. The golden temple was constructed from foam, wood, and fiberglass, painted to look like solid gold. The famous “exploding flower” field? Real animatronic flowers that shot puffs of cornstarch into the actors’ faces.
“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.”