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.”
“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.”
“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.” dora and the lost city of gold behind the scenes
“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.
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. As Merced puts it: “Dora doesn’t get sarcasm
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).
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.” Schwalm
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.