Dora the explorer how old is she

After a museum field trip gone dangerously wrong, Dora and her classmates wind up on a plane to South America, where they team up with a bumbling explorer named Alejandro Eugenio Derbez , who claims he wants to help Dora find her parents.

Like the ragtag group of teens, Alejandro is a new addition to the "Dora" universe not based on any preexisting characters. The film introduces this "idea that there are people who are explorers and there are people who treasure hunters," Bobin says. Facebook Twitter Email. Why is Dora the Explorer a teenager? Answers to all your biggest questions about the movie. Save for a few glimpses of her future self in a couple of TV specials and a doll, Dora has barely looked a day older than 7 in her run of episodes.

The bilingual tot with the unmistakable bangs is looking more akin to a year-old. She is taller, her hair longer, her wardrobe less boxy. She has ears and eyebrows. Nickelodeon stands as the ruler of the sandbox, with four of the top five preschool programs, according to Nielsen Co. The program that averaged 2 million viewers when it launched still commands 1.

In some ways, that protectiveness is our safety net. Despite her preteen look, the older Dora is not necessarily intended for older kids. Older Dora is meant as a companion piece — an aspirational figure to little ones — according to creators Chris Gifford and Valerie Walsh Valdes, who also were behind the original show. The aged-up Dora takes on city life and is in a school where she has human friends who take part in real-life and magical adventures.

Music is also a heavy player in the new series. The Latina heroine still seeks the participation of viewers and continues to mix in Spanish words, but she is presenting curriculum that is aimed slightly older and is dealing with themes such as community service and friendship skills. Bullying has become such a large issue They gave her mestizo — which means a mix of European and Indigenous ancestry — features: Brown skin, brown eyes, and straight, dark hair.

The creators credit the success of "Dora the Explorer" to the extensive research that went into each episode. Gifford told NPR that researchers would read a "storybook version" of episodes to more than kids before they aired. Paramount Pictures decided to bring the beloved character to life this summer, in a family-friendly film that garnered great reviews from critics.

Variety even wrote that Dora ranks "as perhaps the most 'woke' big-screen adventurer since the invention of cinema. Much like the show, which premiered in , "Dora and the Lost City of Gold" made no mention of a specific ethnic background for Dora. Unlike the show, though, the movie was set in real-life countries and made a point to accurately depict Inca culture as well as the indigenous language, Quechua.

This only makes the new film's decision to keep the Latina heroine ethnically ambiguous all the more puzzling to me.

By not exploring Dora's own specific ethnic identity — especially after almost 20 years after her debut — it feels like "Dora and the Lost City of Gold" was missing something. When I watched Dora as a kid, I thought she was Mexican, given her appearance and the way that she spoke Spanish.

That didn't make me, a Puerto Rican and Dominican girl, love her any less. On the contrary, I still saw myself in her. What made Dora so groundbreaking and special was the way that she opened people's minds to cultures and languages that might be different from their own.