 |
| |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Pocahontas (U)
© Walt Disney Pictures - all rights reserved |
| |
|
|
| |
 |
| Tookey's Rating |
|
|
7
/10 |
| |
| Average Rating |
|
|
6.25
/10 |
| |
| Starring |
|
With the voices of:, Pocahontas ........... Irene Bedard, John Smith ........... Mel Gibson
|
| Full Cast > |
|
|
|
| |
Directed by:
Mike Gabriel, Eric Goldberg
Written by:
Carl Bibder, Susannah Grant, Philip Lazebnik. Songs: music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
|
|
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
| Released: |
1995 |
| |
|
| Genre: |
MUSICAL
CARTOON
BIOPIC
FAMILY
|
| |
|
| Origin: |
US |
| |
|
| Colour: |
C |
| |
|
| Length: |
81 |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
An Indian princess mediates between British settlers and her tribe. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
|
| Disney's latest blockbuster is an extraordinary mixture of good and bad, talent and folly - a first-rate family film, but a multimillion dollar monument to political correctness. Pocahontas is a vibrant heroine, while the animal characters - a raccoon, humming-bird and bulldog - steal every scene they are in. The film is a spell-binding piece of story-telling, for grown-ups as well as the young. It's the political correctness that sticks in the throat. The Disney studio has taken the true story of Pocahontas - a sevententh century Indian princess who befriended the English settler John Smith and saved him from death - and turned their asexual relationship into a Romeo and Juliet-style sermon for our times. It has two messages: that different races should get along with one another, and that white people can learn from Native Americans' respect for the environment. It's all terribly well-meaning, and Russell Means, who provides the voice of Pocahantas's father, Chief Powhatan, claims that "It is the finest film ever done in Hollywood on the Native American experience". But the movie does a disservice to Native American interest groups by taking their self-image at face value. The Indians depicted here are courageous, handsome environmentalists and "new age" mystics to a man and woman. The result is that they are just as stereotyped as ever they were in Disney's Peter Pan. Take Chief Powhatan himself. The cartoon depicts him as a devoted father, a peace-loving, maize-growing sage and a committed anti-imperialist. The reality is that he fathered more than 100 children by numerous women. And he was a fearsome warrior and imperialist himself, exterminating his Chesapeake Indian rivals, conquering numerous other tribes and forcing them to pay him penal rates of taxation - 80% of everything they grew or caught. | | The Disney animators have turned Pocahontas into a bosomy, raven-haired supermodel, with Iman's neck, Tina Turner's sex appeal, and a figure that might depress Elle Macpherson. She wears a very nice range of identical, fringed deerskin, off-the-shoulder cocktail-dresses. She is a keen New Ager and strides through the woods as if she owns them - a far cry from the frightened Caucasian heroine of Disney's Snow White. Disney's Pocahontas is transparently designed to be a non-Caucasian Wonder Woman, proof that white people never "civilised" the black races. Her native Virginia is a Garden of Eden, a promised land - nothing like the disease-ridden, mosquito-infested swamp which reduced the first hundred British settlers within a year to 38.When the cartoon John Brown promises her people roads and "decent housing", and even dares to use the politically incorrect term "uncivilised", she is quick to put him right. "What you mean is people not like you," Pocahontas admonishes him. She is Malcolm X in a Wonderbra. At the end of the picture, Disney's Pocahontas remains chaste, unmarried and impeccably anti-imperialist in America, while poor, wounded John Smith sails back to England for medical attention (odd - you'd think these sagacious, civilised-in-their-own-way Native Americans would be able to come up with an appropriate herbal remedy). The reality was very different. Pocahontas was 11 or 12 when she met John Smith, and anything but a beauty. Far from disavowing civilisation and imperialism, she converted at the age of 18 to Christianity, married Sir John Rolfe, an old, rich tobacco merchant, and bore him a son. Pocahontas - now calling herself Lady Rebecca Rolfe - sailed for England, paid for by the Virginia Company which had founded Jamestown, and became their PR woman - trying to attract British merchants into exploiting the New World more effectively. Tuberculosis ended her life in England at the age of 22. She is buried in Gravesend, Kent. It's easy to see why the real story of her life might not appeal to the politically correct. Here we have a Native American who turned her back on her tribal beliefs, became a keen advocate of capitalism and imperialism, married a white sugar-daddy who founded that least fashionable of businesses, the tobacco industry, and in doing so imported slave labour to America. Just as wild a distortion is Disney's pretence that Pocahontas's example inspired settlers and native Americans to live in racial harmony. On the contrary, her tribe under Powhatan's successor descended on Jamestown in the early morning of March 22nd, 1622 with a view to genocide, and succeeded in hacking or shooting to death a third of the settlement's 1,200 inhabitants. Pocahontas's legacy had just as little effect on the British settlers, whose policy towards the Indians remained one of mass extermination. By the end of the 17th century, Virginia had virtually been cleared of Indians - or, as present-day Bosnian Serbs might say, "cleansed". There is, in fact, something wondrously perverse about a family musical based on the early colonisation of Virginia - it's a bit like the Muppets mounting a remake of The Killing Fields. Pocahantas may not tell us much about the 17th century, but it reveals an awful lot about American racial fantasies in the 1990s. However, such considerations are unlikely to worry children, or indeed a majority of grown-ups. The film is splendidly paced, beautiful to look at, and a top-class musical. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz's songs have soaring melodies - especially a lovely ballad, "The Colours of the Wind". They are exquisitely orchestrated and thrillingly animated. Much of the singing is excellent, and even Mel Gibson (voicing John Smith) proves to possess a pleasant light baritone. If you check your scepticism in at the foyer and regard the film as pure entertainment, it is right up there with the best of Disney - and this is, after all, a cartoon, so who would seriously expect it to be realistic? The real Pocahontas didn't sing Broadway ballads either, or have a raccoon and hummingbird as best friends, still less take advice from a talking tree. | |
|
|
|
|
|
