POCAHONTAS (1995):
Written by: Carl Binder, Susannah Grant & Philip LaZebnik
-And NOW WE COME... to the END of the Renaissance.
The most hilarious thing about this is that Disney thought this was going to be their MAGNUM OPUS. Like, after
Beauty and the Beast got some Oscar Cred, they were like "THIS TIME FOR SURE!" and put everything into pushing this as some kind of dramatic spectacle.
The Lion King was thought of around the offices as a lesser work with THIS ONE getting the big push from behind the scenes. So when
Lion King made ALL THE MONEY, and
Pocahontas turned into a punchline that is universally considered to be the "End of the Renaissance", the irony was just amazing. I mean, you can't write stuff like that.
Seriously, this movie has gone on to become Disney's most infamous film EVER. While there are bigger flops (in fact, this one MADE money- way more than company-ruining movies like
The Black Cauldron did), NOTHING did more damage to the Disney BRAND than this one. And if there's one thing worse than losing money... it's losing CREDIBILITY. Before
Pocahontas came out, Disney was on a hot streak the likes of which no studio has ever seen, pumping out hit after hit. It seemed Disney could do no wrong... and so ONE BAD MOVIE was all it would take to break the illusion. There is absolutely nothing more disastrous than this one- you need 2-3 good movies to make up for one dumpster fire, and this one made nearly the entire world sit up at once and go "WELP- Renaissance is over. I guess we're back to crappy movies again". It was so bad that it actually made the NEXT bunch of movies seem worse, simply by being on "the tail end of the Reinaissance".
I actually remember seeing it in theatres and thinking it bit. I remember looking at just how GENERIC everything was, and being annoyed- the Animal Sidekicks were more cloying than ever. And even worse- the PROTAGONISTS were boring! This movie was totally a disappointment given what was happening before. Part of the issue is that it's a bit of historical fiction, meaning that people are going to read into the "Disneyfication" of things EVEN MORE THAN NORMAL, as if Disney didn't do that with EVERY STORY EVER.
Also funny is... Native Americans HATE this movie. They think it embodies all of the worst traits of "Injun Cinema" (the documentary
Reel Injun shows a lot of positive and negative portrayals throughout history, and pretty much shits all over this one), with the Brave White Explorer being entranced by the otherworldly exotic beauty of the Magical Indian Princess. Never mind the fact that the myth of Pocahontas is basically just Self-Insert FanFic by John Smith (a short, portly guy), who invented a story where he used the love of a twelve-year old Indian girl to stop a potential war between their tribes. Basically, Natives even acknowledge that this story is bunk, but the myth kind of swirled up around it because it sounded so rad (with the girl's age usually being whitewashed). So the very people the film was supposed to be all "Yay, you guys!" about were not only hateful of it, but were never going to like it in the first place.
It's easy to see where the hate for this movie comes from, though- everything about it is weak aside from the animation (which is uber-pretty, but often merely serviceable and fails to REALLY show off the way other films have). The suckiness is as follows:
* The main characters are very dull- Pocahontas, John Smith & Ratcliffe are horribly unmemorable.
* Most of the characters are merely tangential, and offer nothing to the plot (Pocahontas' friend, Ratcliffe's assistant, those two guys at the camp who are always talking). Even Kocoum, actually an important character, has about as many lines as Prince Charming in
Cinderella.
* They settled so deeply into the generic "Formula" with the characters that the movie felt cookie-cutter and dull. Especially bad are the little jerk Meeko and the pointless hummingbird- this was when people had finally gotten tired of the generic "Mascot Animal" and "Animal Sidekick" characters. Like... why does Pocahontas have a Hummingbird Sidekick? And then you have a Princess that "Wants Something More" than her life- something Disney had done about THREE TIMES immediately preceding this (Ariel, Belle, Jasmine). It got so obvious that
Animaniacs wrote a song about how cookie-cutter the Princesses were getting:
Gaze upon the Warners' resplendence here. They even use
Just Around The Riverbend as the basis for the number.
* The whole story is just so... un-epic. It's basically one tribe of Indians versus a boatfull of failures and bums. The story's "climax" is a chick jumping in front of an club meant for the guy she just fell in love with last week. Compare this to nearly every other Disney movie and it just falls flat. There's just no major story to it.
* Jim Cummings plays both male Indian roles in
Savages, despite his voice sounding nothing like Chief Powhatan's, and his voice not really changing between roles. Less obvious than when he did Scar's lines in
Be Prepared.
* The whole "Fall in love with the chief's daughter and fight her betrothed" thing is a little old. People accuse James Cameron's
Avatar of ripping this off, but honestly, that story's a bajillion years old and probably crosses every culture's radar at least once in history. Cameron was just using the same old tropes everyone else does
.
* Ratcliffe was one terrible villain. He has the effeminate mannerisms of Scar & Jafar (or y'know, the female villains), but lacks the sheer evil or great lines of any of them. He's just a big fat ponce of a man who doesn't really accomplish anything. He's just greedy, then decides to wipe out the Indians because... because. His
Mine Mine Mine song is okay, but makes him seem juvenile and wimpy instead of something like
Be Prepared or
Poor Unfortunate Souls. This is arguably the movie's greatest flaw- Disney stuff is often MADE by an epic villain, and this guy seems to be just thrown together from leftover scraps of other villains.
* The songs aren't really up to Disney's Renaissance standards. With Howard Ashman dead, and no Celebrity Musician this time around, there was no big-time showstopper that would get endlessly repeated for all time. Some of the songs are catchy, and none are really BAD, but
Just Around The Riverbend and
Colors of the Wind are just never gonna hold a candle to
Be Our Guest and
Part Of Your World, y'know?
I mean, the movie isn't a giant turd or anything- Pocahontas and her Fluorescent-Coloured Leaf-Field (did she beat up Wood Man and gain his Robot Weapon or something?) are well-animated, despite her facial features being a bit screwy, making her look odd sometimes (her mouth is too small for her face, especially when combined with her Playmate Lips). Some of the songs are pretty good (Stephen Schwartz of
Wicked fame was involved here as well), particularly
Colors Of The Wind and
Mine Mine Mine, but in general, nothing ever really hits big, and it's a bunch of "meh" stuff throughout. On a scale of 1-10, the movie's a 5.5 or something. Not a complete waste of time, but easily the worst of the 1990s for Disney.
Almost immediately Pocahontas and her best friend get into a water-spitting girlish tickle-fight underneath an upturned boat. Well now you're just catering to the Slash Shippers.
Reception & Cultural Impact:
-
Pocahontas made money, for certain. But OH MY GOD it was disastrous to Disney's brand name in a way that I don't think any other movie has ever been. I mean, they've laid bigger turds. Movies whose failure has nearly killed the studio, too. But none of them got called out on
Frasier for being historically inaccurate and bad. Nothing hurt the BRAND like this very big, public turd. It's not for nothing that this movie stained the "Renaissance" and made people discount later films, too. Basically... this movie is Disney's 32X.
Let me explain- Sega during the '90s was on a HUGE hot streak. They were kicking Nintendo's ass in a way that nobody thought possible. But when their much-hyped Sega Saturn was a while in coming out, they decided to create this "stop-gap" between the 16-bit Genesis and the 32-bit Saturn. The "32X" was an add-on to the Genesis that let you play some more graphically-intensive games. Except it licked ass, everyone hated it, and it failed. It didn't KILL Sega or anything, BUT... it hurt their image. Their BRAND suffered. Because after a couple years of non-stop hits, suddenly they laid a giant egg and everyone knew they weren't untouchable.
And this is what
Pocahontas did to Disney. After a five year period in which we saw
The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and
The Lion King... in comes this piece of crap film and everyone goes "AHHHHHHH... well, I guess it couldn't last". In this sense, the movie did a HELL of a lot of damage to the Disney Legacy- though it did well in theatres, it's creative and public failure basically hurt the Disney BRAND, which is something you can't really put a dollar sign on. That it was so soon after Howard Ashman's death didn't help- it was the sign that Disney was faltering, and WAS made up of humans after all.
So you still see SOME stuff from the movie. Pocahontas is a Meet & Greet Character at Disney Parks, usually portrayed by anyone who looks "non-white" ethnically (a lotta Asian & Latina Pocahontases...). Princess performers actually say that she gets hit on by male guests the most, as she bares the most skin out of the girls. But otherwise, you don't really see much of this.
Pocahontas 2 was a straight-to-video release, and had a SUPER-rare thing... a Princess BREAK-UP, as Pocahontas and John Smith realize they've grown apart, and she falls in love with the more human and less alpha John Rowlfe. I found it actually a bit better than the original movie (Rowlfe being shocked and embarrassed by her "underwear", which covers more skin than her traditional outfit, is funny), but it's still pretty lame.