In the 1990s, films about or containing indigenous people were relatively coaxed as stories that were sympathetic to the Native Americans. However, Hollywood understood that the white man could not be the bad guy, so they created the ‘good’ white man, one in touch with nature and the native Americans, and the bad white man who wants to run them out of their land. Many films of the 90s portrayed this exact story structure such as The Last of the Mohicans and Dances with Wolves but the film to round the decade was none other than Disney’s Pocahontas. Pocahontas is a film that I would categorize as a reflection of America coming to terms with the way they treated the people before them. Up until this point Disney’s track record with indigenous people on the big screen was slim to none except for the horrendous depiction of them in Disney’s Peter Pan. It seems they wanted to right the wrongs of their past, but they seemed to stumble into the narrative that is drilled into our heads in our own educational institutions; the native Americans and colonialists were friends!
A little background on how the film came to be: Disney animation believed that the film was going to be a smash hit. Many animators jumped ship from The Lion King in order to work on the film that was perceived to be the better of the two. Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, heads of the Disney company/distribution, wanted to create this film in order to get another best picture nomination like Beauty and the Beast previously did. The heads wanted to usher in a film with artistic credibility, but the final product seems to look more like a mistake. Unfortunately, the Disney company was stuck with their own ‘brand’ that was developed in the 1930s; the studio produced wholesome, family films with talking animals and wonderful scores. The films’ pressure to be produced within Disney’s vertical integration model such as selling merchandise and theme park tickets, led to the downfall of the movie as a whole.
Originally the film was going to be a historically brooded film in which Pocahontas was going to be a young child who realizes the motivations of the colonialist white men. But that wouldn’t be a story you could turn into a happy meal toy. So Disney decided to age up Pocahontas and create a Romeo and Juliet narrative. Near the conclusion of the film, we are introduced to a song called “Savages” depicting the notion that the native Americans and white men were just as bad as one another. This idea exacerbates the story in which we are told most of our educational lives. Disney conveniently leaves out many historical happenings such as Pocahontas being taken prisoner, her eventual conversion to Anglicanism and her marriage to John Rolfe which many scholars believe was to iron out the differences between the English and Native Americans. The straight to home video sequel, Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World, touches on her time in England, but that has more problems than can be discussed in this post. One cannot talk about the negatives without developing some positives about the film such as Disney’s first step in depicting indigenous people and the progress they are striving to achieve. Pocahontas is also an independent, adventurous, wise and future leader of her people. It is her compassion rather than violence that saves everyone in the end. Additionally, she does not fit into the stereotypical images that Disney depicts of women which is helpless, naïve, and complacent. She is quite sexualized and is drawn as such with animators arguing that this was a love story so she had to be drawn like a woman. If we look at Disney’s past, the only other character as sexualized is Jasmine in Aladdin and a year later Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but that is a whole separate examination of Disney’s exploitation of minority women.
Disney’s Pocahontas could easily be an educational film in which a dialog between student and educator can discuss how Native American’s are presented on the big screen. I think the film would have benefited from a story that only focused on Native Americans. Yes, put it in all the cheesy songs about freedom associated with water or even let some of the animal characters talk, but the best way to make powerful Native American films is to stop making films about their relation to white people. Look at films like Lilo and Stitch or Moana, it seemed to work for them (even though they have what I’ll call Disney moments). At the end of the day Disney’s Pocahontas is an oft-forgotten film that I don’t believe will age very well in its depiction of indigenous people, but it some ways if it weren’t for the movie Disney would have never been able to learn from its mistakes. The film’s historical inaccuracy, playing into all stereotypes of Native Americans, and its Disney-ness was the films’