Dora Saves the Snow Princess

Tonight is the television premiere of Dora the Explorer’s latest film, an hour-long special named Dora Saves the Snow Princess. The DVD has been available since September 30, accompanied by a mountain of licensing material including some pretty fun-looking videogames for the Wii and the PS2, plus the fruit snacks I mentioned the other day.

The sixty-minute running time makes it, I believe, Dora’s longest production to date.
I’ve been a fan of previous specials--with pirates, Swiper in a bottle, Sleeping Boots, and so forth--and have high expectations for this as well. Though it’s fairly well known that Dora the Explorer itself was created at the beginning of the millennium by Valerie Walsh, Chris Gifford, and Eric Weiner, we don’t always--or often--give credit to those folks behind individual productions. So I would like to provide full credits for this film, but all I could find was that amazon lists the directors as Sherie Pollack, George S. Chialtas, and Arnie Wong. Pollack (amazon; imdb) has done an immense amount of work on previous Dora’s, including the episode “Meet Diego” that introduced that character, as well, evidently, as some on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for Playhouse Disney. I saw the “Diego” episode and many more eps that were done under Pollack’s direction and, not surprisingly, found them all top-notch. George Chialtas (amazon; imdb) looks to have done an equal amount of Dora directorial work; both he and Pollack have worked in other positions in other animation departments, including on The Simpsons. Wong (amazon; imdb) has also directed extensively for Dora as well as CatDog, with credits as an animator stretching back into the early 70s.

Dora Saves the Snow Princess is set to become another extended-length Dora classic.