33. Pocahontas (1995)

When Disney was making The Lion King, they thought that was going to be their little side project, something to fill the time so that there wouldn’t be too big a gap between Aladdin and their next film; Pocahontas was to be their next big project, attracting all the top animators and being propped up as their new masterpiece – The Lion King was just there to hold people over. Really think about how ridiculous that sounds. It’s not even the fact that The Lion King is such a good movie which makes this hard so hard to believe, it’s that Pocahontas is such a BAD one. Though still relatively financially successful and not too critically panned (or at least, not as much as it should have been), Pocahontas still stands out from its contemporaries, but not in the way Disney intended it, being the one big dud of the Renaissance films.

To get one of the only good things out of the way first, I will say that the colours in this movie are beautiful; there is a different, sort of pastel colour kind of look employed with Pocahontas that helps it stand out among the rest of the Disney movies and this use of colour is among Disney’s best, calling back to the wonderful colouring of Mary Blair’s concept art for some of the earlier films. This extends to the backgrounds, which both employ this colouring as well as a more simplistic style, using a lot of block colours and basic shapes to create a more stylised, but peaceful atmosphere, capturing the feel of the untainted Virginia lands perfectly, being reminiscent of the beautiful forest scenes from Sleeping Beauty. Unfortunately, this is where the positives with the film’s visual style end, as it is otherwise not very nice to look at. The animation is lazy and lifeless; it is usually quite smooth at least, but can sometimes be jerky and stiff and is never very interesting to watch either way. There is just no creativity or imagination to this animation, it’s all so slow and lacking in energy; this is partly due to the equally boring character designs, which just do not lend themselves to the kind of exaggerated animation Disney is known for. The characters are all blocky, lacking in detail or uniqueness; they almost all look exactly the same, as this more simplistic art style robs them of any sense of personality. This isn’t Disney at all and while I have no problem with them trying out new styles, this one just didn’t work it out; Disney had finally perfected the way it animated human beings with Aladdin and, to a lesser extent, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, making them more stylised and cartoonish, but Pocahontas takes a big step backwards by trying to make its humans look more realistic, falling back into the familiar problem of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, where the human characters look like awkward puppets. There are some more traditionally “cartoony” character designs here, but most of them are dialled back too far to really match Disney’s approach to characterisation, they almost all have these bland, expressionless faces that make it very difficult to convey emotion through the animation. John Smith for example has this huge brow and these tiny little eyes that are too far apart, leaving him with a constantly empty and gormless expression; this, combined with Mel Gibson’s bored delivery, often make it impossible to really tell how he’s supposed to be feeling at all. Though the colours and backgrounds are strong, everything else about Pocahontas’ visual style just does not work.

Even worse is the story, which is told poorly to be sure, but fails on an even more basic level by being intrinsically linked to a fundamentally flawed moral: “Prejudice is wrong and we must respect each other’s differences.” Now of course, that’s a fine message, even though it has been done better already in Fox and the Hound and Beauty and the Beast, but Pocahontas fails not only because it is childishly simplistic in its approach, but also because it somehow manages to constantly defy the very points it’s trying to make. For example, we are supposed to side with Pocahontas in her claims that John Smith shouldn’t push his own ideas of being “civilised” onto her people; again, true enough, we shouldn’t push our beliefs onto others or look down on them because they are different, that’s fair. But, despite asking for John Smith to respect her culture, Pocahontas never does the same; she never acknowledges any of the good points of John Smith’s culture and looks down upon it with just as much snobbishness as he looked down upon hers.

‘Duhhhh...?’

This is where the movie’s moral completely falls apart, as rather than respect that both sides have good and bad points, the film consistently portrays the Native Americans as right and the Pilgrims as wrong – the Native Americans are almost entirely nice and friendly and seem to live an idyllic, perfect life co-existing with nature, completely ignoring the fact that they hunted and killed animals as well, which kind of defies the point of “Colours of the Wind” which is all about how great it is that they live alongside the animals peacefully, but whatever. The Pilgrims on the other hand are callously and cartooinshly racist and insensitive, excitedly singing that they’re going to go shoot a Indian ‘or maybe two or three!’ They fire with little to no provocation and seem motivated solely by gold and bloodlust; not only is it frustrating that they are portrayed as such one-note characters, but what’s even more frustrating is that the film doesn’t even have the balls to go all the way with this, as at the end it just wimps out and says “Oh no, don't worry, it was just Ratcliffe the whole time, he was the only bad guy and now that he’s gone the Pilgrims aren’t racist anymore and everyone can just get along, yay!” The way in which the film refuses to tackle any of the harsh truths of racism or prejudice and just uses a single, blatantly villainous and hateful character as a figurehead for prejudice is incredibly childish and quite frankly, insulting. Compare this to the seemingly charming and heroic Gaston, who is secretly a jealous, prejudiced monster, or the townsfolk that follow him, who mostly seem like decent people, but are driven to violence by fear, due to a very reasonable and understandable assumption that the Beast is dangerous; the difference in maturity when it comes to characterisation between these two films is stunningly blatant.

Pocahontas refuses to ever take its very serious subject matter seriously, portraying everything as either right or wrong with no shades of grey. John Smith is wrong, Pocahontas is right; nature is good, buildings and technology are bad blah blah blah. This is very familiar “pro-environmental message in a kid’s film” garbage that we’ve seen a million times before, but usually in bad TV shows like Captain Planet or Saved by the Bell, not a Disney movie. Pocahontas doesn’t even scratch the surface of the real argument against colonisation and imperialism; we are expected to go along with Pocahontas because the Pilgrims have guns and guns are bad, but what about other scientific advances, like medicine? Are we supposed to believe that we shouldn’t try to save lives through science? That John Smith shouldn’t try to educate Pocahontas on how to deal with diseases and injuries, just because that’s not what nature intended? Since when has the argument “things are fine the way they are, we don’t need them to get any better” ever been true for the human race? There is a scene where Pocahontas encourages John Smith not to point his gun at a bear, but instead to play with its cubs; in real life, this would more than likely get you mauled to death, so maybe John Smith isn’t so wrong to y’know DEFEND HIMSELF AGAINST A GRIZZLY BEAR? The film never acknowledges that Pocahontas might be wrong sometimes and John Smith might be right sometimes, it is a very simple story of a “civilised” man who meets an “uncivilised” girl and realises everything he thought was right was wrong; it’s something that’s been done a million times from Ferngully to Avatar and it is an incredibly tired cliché that is almost never approached with any maturity or honesty, certainly not here. To make matters worse, the film’s dialogue is just incredibly dull, it has no wit or thought or personality it’s just the most basic, bland stuff; at times it’s easy to forget you’re watching a Disney movie, it feels like a bad rip-off of a Disney movie you might see on Cartoon Network when they needed something to fill a two hour timeslot and didn’t really have anything better to put on. The pacing is just as bad, it manages to both feel like barely anything happens in the entire movie, yet also it feels like it lasts a lifetime; almost every scene is completely lacking in anything even resembling entertainment value, it’s just moment after moment of bad dialogue and tired old clichés.

‘So what is the wind like, magic or something?’

‘White man no ask questions.’

The characters are an almost comically generic collection of Disney stereotypes that seem to have almost deliberately had any likeability or originality completely sucked out of them, compounded by the fact that most of the voice acting is completely lacking in any energy. Everyone sounds tired and bored, save a couple of exceptions, Pocahontas’ father, Chief something-or-other (of course he’s the chief) in particular sounds like he literally phoned it in; there is a scene where he discovers that Kocoum, who he views like a surrogate son, has been murdered and asks ‘Who did this?’ But the most emotion that voice actor Russell Means can muster is mild annoyance at best, it just sucks what little tension and emotion there was right out of the scene; like so much else in Pocahontas, they just didn’t care. Pocahontas herself is an unfortunate return – or perhaps, more of a modern recreation – of the boring, generic, Disney princess format; while Disney tries to replicate the “bright and adventurous young woman who wants something more from life” character that did so well for them in their last few movies, they succeed only in turning this once revolutionary (for them anyway) character type into just another cliché for them, with Pocahontas being such a second-rate carbon copy that she seems almost like a parody of Belle, Jasmine or Ariel from a bad SNL sketch. While she follows the same basic template as the aforementioned heroines, Pocahontas has absolutely no personality; she “wants more” from life, but we never really find out what it is that she wants, just that she had a dream about a spinning arrow. She is clearly supposed to be fun and quirky, in that she rejects Kocoum for being too serious and yet she has no more personality or charm than he does, she’s just as boring and uninteresting as he is; how are they not suited for one another again? She has no real character, doesn’t really drive the story in any way and hardly even does anything at all, really. She is one of the dullest and most ineffectual of all of Disney’s protagonists and considering some of the early ones, that’s saying something.

John Smith is an equally tedious rehash of Disney prince tropes, being most similar to Eric; they clearly try to present him as rather charming and cocky and, while he is compared to most of the incredibly boring characters that populate this film, compared to actually well written versions of this character such as Aladdin, he really isn’t very charming at all. Pocahontas and John Smith’s relationship is impressively badly written – they barely spend any time together, don’t seem to really have anything in common and come from completely different worlds with nothing to agree or connect over and yet they are, as usual, presented as this perfect star crossed couple, on par with Romeo and Juliet. Their “romance” if you can even call it that, isn’t even written as well as some of Disney’s earlier attempts, such as Aurora and Philip, that’s how bad it is. These two just have no chemistry whatsoever, every scene they share is completely flat and a bore to watch. The side characters are just as boring: Pocahontas’ father is a total stereotype, the overbearing father in a position of authority who wants to choose her life for her etc. etc. he isn’t a character at all, he’s just a prop that doesn’t even do its job very well. The animal characters are insanely annoying, Meelo in particularly is “The Hooter” of the movie for sure, quite an impressive feat considering how none of these characters are likeable to begin with. They are similar to the animals from Cinderella in that they  engage in frequent, unfunny slapstick that doesn’t relate to anything going on in the “story”, taking up far too large a portion of the movie with their goofy and pointless antics. Again, like in Cinderella, there is just nothing to enjoy about these characters, they are simply there to put on posters and lunchboxes to draw the kids in, it’s pathetically ineffectual in its obvious manipulation. The Native Americans and Pilgrims as a whole do so little that they’re almost not even worth talking about; as said earlier, they are just ridiculously basic and reductive stereotypes, the closest any of them get to characterisation is “he’s the young one” or “he’s the Scottish one” or “he’s the one played by Christian Bale”. There is nothing to them whatsoever.

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Ratcliffe is a terrible villain, being yet another foppish, camp, pitiful dandy, this having become a pattern in the Renaissance movies at this point, after Jafar and Scar. He also borrows hugely from Captain Hook and to a lesser extent, Rattigan; to make a long story short, he is a messy mix of previous Disney villains, all sewn up together in an ugly patchwork quilt of a character. While Jafar and Scar were pathetic at times, they could also be threatening and capable and were always charming and funny, but Ratcliffe is always so pathetic that it’s impossible to take him seriously; he is also so slimy, snobbish and one-dimensional that it’s very difficult to enjoy watching him at all. Even when they do try to make him threatening or scary, he is so ludicrously evil for such a petty and boring reason (greed, yawn) and so awkwardly tied to the terribly unsubtle prejudice moral that it’s just laughable. When he’s supposed to be funny, he’s contemptible, when he’s supposed to be contemptible, he’s funny; he’s just a failure in every way. To be fair to David Ogden Stiers, he is one of the only cast members to actually put any effort into his performance and objectively, he does a good job, but there is just no way to make this character legitimately interesting, fun or threatening, he’s got to be one of the worst Disney villains of all time. Wiggins is a similarly generic villainous sidekick; though he is more chirpy and positive than most, which is at least a little different, it’s not different enough to breathe life into this tired old cliché and quite frankly, his chirpiness is just annoying and he really got on my nerves, even though he never really did that much. To be fair though, he does get the only funny line in the movie, when Ratcliffe asks why the Native Americans attacked them and Wiggins quickly responds ‘because we invaded their lands and cut down their trees and dug up their earth?’ If only the rest of the movie was filled with even a tenth of that brief moment of wit. The characters in this movie are some of the most forgettable in Disney history and the few that are memorable are memorable for all the wrong reasons.

The songs are one of the better parts of the movie, which of course doesn’t really count for much and they are still mostly quite bland, with lyrics that lack any imagination. Songs like “The Virginia Company” and “Just Around the Riverbend” are upbeat enough to be fun to listen to, but the lyrics just have no thought put into them, there are no clever lines or interesting word choices, it’s just very by the book stuff. The best song of the bunch is “Mine, Mine, Mine”, which is very catchy and honestly rather funny, being the only good use of Ratcliffe’s overly foppish and greedy character in the movie; the choreography with the animation is great and some of the rhymes are rather playful, particularly ‘Oh with all you’ve got in ya boys, dig up Virginia boys.’ It’s undeniably the best part of the movie and one of its only good sequences. “Colours of the Wind” is the “Whole New World Number” and a very typical one at that; as is often the case with the “Whole New World Numbers” it is the most remembered song of the bunch, despite being one of the weakest, of course. I have the same opinion of it as I usually do with these types of musical numbers – it’s not a bad song and the music is good, but the lyrics are sappy, boring and in this case, overly preachy; I don’t care about Pocahontas and John Smith, I don’t care about Pocahontas’ confused relationship with nature and bizarre belief that rocks have souls, I just don’t care about the song. The animation is good and the tune is nice, but really, what’s the point. “Savages” has quite a catchy rhythmic chant to it, but is completely ruined by its hilariously bad lyrics, which encapsulate all the problems with the clunky and poorly tackled anti-prejudice themes of the movie. With such ridiculously on-the-nose lines as ‘Here’s what you get when races are diverse’ and ‘They’re not like you and me, which means they must be evil’ completely destroy the serious and frightening tone the song is trying to get across; it feels like watching a song from Reefer Madness or some other satirical musical, it’s amazing that they wrote those lines with absolute sincerity. “Savages” is effectively “The Mob Song” from Beauty and the Beast, which was already a little goofy at times, but lacking even the small amount of subtlety that song had, producing a laughably goofy and ham-fisted song with lyrics that felt like they were written by a ten year old who thinks he’s so smart because he just learned what irony is; actually, that pretty much sums up the whole movie.

‘Cool, this’ll be a great shot for the trailer!’

‘But won’t it be like, really melodramatic and over-the-top in conte-’

‘You’re fired.’

Pocahontas is a stupid, stupid movie. It is lazy, derivative, childish and tackles a very serious issue with all the maturity of someone who still thinks Biker Mice From Mars was a really good idea. The overly simplistic attitude towards racial relations and imperialism is almost offensively bad and the incredibly boring and unlikeable cast of characters don’t do anything to help matters. Though the songs are mostly not too bad, the lyrics are lazy at best and at worst, are clumsy to the point that they come off as parodies of bad musical lyrics. Though the art is nice and colourful and the backgrounds are mostly very good, this doesn’t stop Pocahontas from being sloppy, shallow and, perhaps worst of all, simply boring.



3.5/10

Next Week: The Hunchback of Notre Dame!

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