POCAHONTAS
A film review by Adrian Preston
Copyright 1996 Adrian Preston
Occasionally, not often, but every now and again, the animators at Walt Disney are allowed to produce an absolutely breathtaking piece of animation. Of course, it's usually so well hidden among the arrays of generic forgetable characters and anthropomorphised creatures that it is difficult to pick out. They did it in the Lion King, the first few seconds of a sunrise over the African savanna was astonishingly beautiful, as the sun burst over the plains, the traditional African song made it a visual and acoustic treat. They did it in Fantasia, which don't forget was probably the first experimental piece to explore animation as a form of art. And they did it in Pocahontas. It's well hidden, but during one of the songs, as Pocahontas is singing to John Smith, she sings about the wind, and her face dissolves into streaks of almost impressionistic pastel shades, giving the feeling of life and movement and real beauty in the world around her. It really is a quite lovely and effective piece of animation.
Unfortunately it only lasts about three seconds, and is the only highlight in one of the most forgetable films to come out of the Disney studios since.. well, since for ever really. The plot is really quite simple: The English sail to the Americas to exploit the land, among them is John Smith, the captain of the vessel, who falls in love with the beautiful Pocahontas, a native indian. Their love for one another stops the English and indians warring. That's it. Add a couple of stock Disney comic relief characters ( A raccoon, a small bird and a spoilt small dog. ), add a typical villain ( The evil governor, who sees the Americas as a way of getting rich and improving his position in court. ) and even so, there is still nothing there with which to make a film. Disney seem to have realised this and in their panicked state ( 'Oh my God, it's only going to last twenty minutes, what are we going to do?' ) must have decided to pack it out with song after song after song.
Now the Disney music has, quite rightly, won a few awards in the past. But in Pocahontas the dreary score is just dreadful. Maybe it's just me, but I could hardly tell them apart, just padding, they advanced the plot not one iota and half of them were completely unescessary.
I'm a great fan of Disney villains. Prince John in Robin Hood was a masterpiece, as was Shere Khan (Jungle book), but recently with villains like Ursula (The little mermaid) Gaston (Beauty and the Beast) and Jafar (Aladdin) they seem to have become, well, tamer, milder, not as evil. The classic Disney villain recently had a resurgence in Scar ( The Lion King ), but even so, was still only a reworking of Prince John. The evil Governor from Pocahontas is another in the line of manufactured stock bad guys, instantly forgetable. Remember the wicked witch in Sleeping Beauty kicking the skull across the floor? There was a time when Disney were able to imbue a real sense of evil into their baddies, or a superb sense of comic evil.
Finally we come to the MORAL. Disney recently reminds me of the animaniacs' 'wheel of morality'. It's tempting to believe they have one at the Disney studios and every now and then spin it, to see what moral their next film will espouse. The plot is secondary. THOU SHALT FACE UP TO THY RESPONSIBILITIES yelled the Lion King, THOU SHALL NOT JUDGE ON EXTERNAL APPEARANCE screamed Beauty and the Beast, THOU SHALT BE TRUE TO THYSELF wailed Aladdin. Disney have always, always been good triumphs over evil kind of guys, but with recent films we have had morals rammed down our throats till they are coming out of our ears. And Pocahontas is more guilty than most THOU SHALT LOVE THY FELLOW HUMAN BEING it berates us, THOU SHALT NOT JUDGE ON SKIN COLOUR it beats us around the head with. All very worthy sentiments, but guys, come on, give us some entertainment!
Anyway, that's Pocahontas. Notice I haven't said anything about the horrifically butchered politically correct version of history Pocahontas espouses, and the well-manered civil version of the native indians they give us, and a host of other appaling devices they've used to get the morals across. But still, it only a cartoon.
My son, who usually adores Walt Disney films lasted about ten minutes into this one, and then got bored and wandered off. I sat through the entire length and can safely give it a:
* (one star) out of five rating. And that's only because there is no symbol on the keyboard with which I can denote half-a-star.:)
-- Adi, Lecturer in ??????? Kingston University
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews