On June 11, 1995, the headline on the cover of the New York Daily News read: “‘Poca’ Party.” Underneath was an aerial picture of the 100,000 people who gathered the day before for the premiere of Disney’s Pocahontas in New York City’s Central Park, where they watched the film on four mammoth movie screens.
The 33rd animated feature from The Walt Disney Studio soared into the summer of 1995, like leaves that were a part of “The Colors of the Wind,” with the force of a grand event. It landed squarely in the midst of Disney’s Animation Renaissance, where the medium had made a comeback few could have envisioned, with Pocahontas arriving one year after the Studio’s record-breaking The Lion King.
Hard to believe, but Pocahontas celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. Based loosely on historical events, it’s the story of the title character, the independent daughter of the Powhatan Chief, and the romance that develops between her and Captain John Smith, who journeys from England to the New World with other settlers. As the tensions arise between the natives and the settlers, it’s Pocahontas who helps prevent an all-out war.
Pocahontas, co-directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, featured the voices of Irene Bedard as Pocahontas (with Judy Kuhn as the character’s singing voice), Mel Gibson as John Smith, Russell Means as Chief Powhattan (with Jim Cummings as the singing voice), David Odgen Stiers as the voice of the villain, Governor Ratcliffe, and his manservant, Wiggins; Linda Hunt as the magical Grandmother Willow, who guides Pocahontas; Michelle St. John as friend Nakoma; James Apaumut Fall as Kocoum, a member of the tribe who wants to marry Pocahontas; and Billy Connolly, Joe Baker, and Christian Bale, as settlers Ben, Lon and Thomas (respectively) who come to the New World with Smith.
After its event premiere in Central Park on June 10th, Pocahontas opened everywhere on June 23rd. To celebrate the film’s thirtieth anniversary, what follows is insight from several of the artists who worked on the film, taken from interviews conducted around the time that Pocahontas debuted:
Co-director Mike Gabriel first pitched the idea of Pocahontas at one of the Disney Studio “Gong Show” meetings. Modeled after the 1970s game show and talent show of the same name, artists could attend these meetings and present an idea for a future animated feature to Studio leadership. If the leadership team didn’t feel that it would work, the pitch would receive the “Gong.” If you didn’t get “gong-ed,” it moved forward.
When Gabriel pitched Pocahontas, he created a mock “one sheet” movie poster. The poster featured the character Tiger Lily from Peter Pan, with the title “Pocahontas” splashed across it. Thankfully, it wasn’t met with a “Gong.” Gabriel remembered the meeting:
“Basically, I just didn’t want to bore them [laughs]. Some people get up there and do a ten-minute story outline that’s just boring as hell. So, I figured I had faith in the title, and if the title hooks them, they’ll ask questions, and they’ll get information that way. So, it seemed to work, even with that Tiger Lily ‘rip-off.’[laughs]”
The Pocahontas team conducted extensive research during the early stages of film production. This included trips to Jamestown, Virginia, where the film and the events took place, as well as meetings with numerous members of the Native American community and an immersion into their culture. Co-director Eric Goldberg said of the research:
“We really wanted to present certain things in this film as interesting to our audience. It would have been very easy, for example, for us to make a film about Native Americans that included teepees, totem poles, and big, long, feathery headdresses, the way people are used to seeing those images from Southwest Native Americans. But we didn’t want to do that. So, we did go back to Virginia, and we did go to the Jamestown settlement and museum. And we met with the surviving members of the of Powhatan nation and spoke to them to get a flavor of what they were like and what they found important.
“They found a sense of community very important. They wanted to see that portrayed in the film. I think we’ve done that. The fact is that we could take their dwellings, take their dress, take the types of utensils that they use, and make that interesting because it is unique. They care about nature and giving back to the earth. We wanted to put that into the movie. There was a lot of attention paid to all of that.”
One of the film’s iconic moments is the scene in which Pocahontas and John Smith meet for the first time. It all unfolds compellingly and quietly in front of a waterfall. Glen Keane, who served as supervising animator for Pocahontas and also storyboarded this sequence, discussed how this dramatic moment came to be:
“The more I thought about it, I said, ‘Well, how did it work out for me when I met my wife?’ It was kind of a love-at-first-sight thing. I met her at a movie in 1972, on line, to see The Godfather. We were both seniors in high school. This girl was standing behind me, and I turned around, and she was there, and I don’t remember anything that she said. But I remember that whole time; I remember the orange blossoms in the air, I remember the temperature, the feelings that were there. I thought this is what this moment [in Pocahontas] has to be. It has to be something bigger than life, beyond just these two people standing there. The place where they met was very important. To have it in front of this waterfall, with just the roar of the waterfall behind them, the mist slowly revealing Pocahontas, kind of like clouds swirling around, made it very ethereal.
“She knows that she wants to run, but she also knows that she wants to stay. She’s been tracking and following him. There’s this very subtle little thing where her tension is just to lean off to screen right and run away, but, if you watch the scene, she slowly, very slowly, inches over to the left, and her head drops down slightly, which says, ‘I’m going to stay here for a moment.’ Then, he moves a little bit; then she looks at his gun, he drops the gun. Everything is very, very subtle.”
The songs in Pocahontas were by Alan Menken, with lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (who would go on to craft Wicked). They included “Just Around the Riverbend,” “Mine, Mine, Mine,” and the Oscar-winning “Colors of the Wind.” In a 1998 interview, discussing why the Broadway-style musical seemed so at home in animation, Schwartz referred to Pocahontas:
“In a stage musical, one of the most effective moments you can have is having a really fine singer standing in the center of the stage by his or herself singing for three or four minutes. That can be one of the best things in the show. You can’t get away with that in film. My stock line is, ‘If you’re going to write a ballad for a feature, the singer better be going over a waterfall in a canoe! [laughs]'”
The look of Pocahontas was influenced by artist Eyvind Earle and his work on Disney’s classic Sleeping Beauty (1959), where he created a distinctive, clean, and vertical style that is unique to that Disney film. Eric Goldberg discussed the challenges of bringing this style to Pocahontas:
“The design of the film that we chose, from the design of the characters to the design of the backgrounds and the general tone of the movie, is completely unforgiving, in that the design itself is very crisp, but there aren’t a lot of round edges or circles in it and things that are ‘squashy and stretchy,’ that you have a lot of cartoon liberty with. So, it means that every little nick in the animation that’s a mistake or every little line in clean-up will show. It is a very daunting, this task that we set for everybody, and they just did it beautifully.”
Through its artistry, songs, and story, Pocahontas provides a message that still resonates thirty years later, as Mike Gabriel discussed in 1995:
“To me, it’s as simple as our similarities are much greater than our differences. Even though we like to rant and rave that we’re all completely different and each nation and each culture has its own idiosyncrasies and separate ideas, I think what we show in the movie is that we’re not all that different.”
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
Thanks for this look back, Michael; it’s interesting reading up on the process of making Pocahontas. I believe a good book could be made about the journey of Gabriel’s initial pitch to its eventual screen debut and subsequent reception, though I suspect Disney would want to suppress any negativity and it would be hard to get access to the needed resources and people without Disney’s approval.
I have to agree with the consensus that this is one of the weaker films in the Disney animated feature canon, with a bland vocal performance for a bland male lead, the lamest Disney villain, and a story that, while well-intentioned, changes the source material (in this case, actual history that’s already mostly oversimplified and misunderstood by most of the public) too much in order to squeeze it into a fairly typical culture clash story. Still, there are elements of the movie that work, from the Earle-inspired visuals to Bedard’s performance as the title character to its flawed-but-generally-good attempt at portraying the Powhatan culture. And while I don’t know if this is a hot take, I will say that at least three of the songs (“Just Around the Riverbend”, “Colors of the Wind”, and “Steady as the Beating Drum”) are genuinely good. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but my memory is that “Savages” is also pretty good (and fittingly unnerving), while the other songs are more or less just there.)
Pocahontas does not rise to the level of classic, and I can understand people hating it for its inaccuracies, but in the end I can’t say it’s terrible. I would sooner watch it again than The Aristocats or Dinosaur.
When people complained that the movie distorted history by having Pocahontas fall in love with Smith rather than John Rolfe, Mel Gibson said “We have a talking tree, and people say it’s unrealistic because we left out John Rolfe?”
On the one hand, I can understand that argument; on the other… well, Erin’s comment below summarizes the other viewpoint pretty succinctly.
I watched “Pocahontas” again earlier this year. It’s a gorgeous movie, with spectacular backgrounds, brilliant character animation, and some of the best use of colour in any animated feature. Its musical score stands among Disney’s finest. It was made at a time when Disney’s animation division had achieved such phenomenal success that they felt emboldened to take some daring risks with the film’s story, tone, and subject matter. Whether or not these risks paid off in the end may be debated. Personally, I have never found it quite as emotionally engaging as its predecessors in the Disney Renaissance.
It’s uncharacteristically heavy and serious by Disney standards. Most of the humour, such as it is, is provided by Pocahontas’s animal friends and Ratcliffe’s dog. I admire the decision to cast a raccoon and a hummingbird, two endemic American species with no close analogues in the Old World, and I’m also glad that the initial plans for them to be voiced by wisecracking comedians were reconsidered. A comic character along the lines of Aladdin’s Genie would have been grossly out of place here.
“Pocahontas” came along in the middle of a resurgent wave of Native American activism following the Super Bowl victory of the Washington Redskins and the World Series appearance of the Atlanta Braves, both in 1992, drawing national attention to the shenanigans of both teams’ fans; also, the Super Bowl was held that year in the state of Minnesota, which has a large Native American population. At the same time, religious conservatives were starting to target Disney for corporate policies that they deemed insufficiently hostile to gay people, hence “anti-family”. Thus “Pocahontas” received stronger criticism from more quarters than any previous Disney picture. I recall one op-ed writer who was affronted that Disney neglected to include the conversion of the historical Pocahontas to Christianity; he seemed to feel that that should have been the focus of the movie. Other took umbrage that the English colonists, always touted as such heroic figures in our grade school textbooks, were depicted as “savages”. (I find the “Savages” number the most effective dramatic moment in the film; I’m sure others disagree.)
Kevin Costner’s “Dances with Wolves” set a new standard for a more authentic and respectful portrayal of Native Americans in historical films, and Disney spared no effort to emulate this example, even hiring a member of Virginia’s Powhatan nation as a consultant. She, however, ultimately left in frustration. I have to pity the poor expert consultants who are hired to work on motion pictures. I’m sure that many of them approach the project with high hopes of having veto power over every creative decision, only to discover that their advice and suggestions, however welcome, may be accepted or rejected as the filmmakers see fit.
Nevertheless, the film made a very positive impression on many in the audience. A friend told me that a little girl who lived next door to him used to listen to the “Pocahontas” soundtrack CD every single day for weeks on end. I would love to have been present at its Central Park premiere.
The late Jim Korkis felt that “Pocahontas” was due for reevaluation, and that it would eventually be regarded as one of Disney’s great classic films. We’ll see; Jim was usually right about these things. For my own part, I can enjoy “Pocahontas” in the same way that I can Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West”, despite its weak ending and cavalier attitude towards American history, for its great music and breathtaking artistry.
For more information on the making of “Pocahontas”, please see Lyons, Michael, DRAWN TO GREATNESS: DISNEY’S ANIMATION RENAISSANCE, pp. 83-91, Theme Park Press, 2021.
Actually, the animal companion was originally going to be a wild turkey named Red Feathers and he was going to be voiced by John Candy (who previously voiced the albatross Wilber in “The Rescuers Down Under”). However, John’s untimely death in 1994 and the decision of going with pantomime animal companions may have been the reason of the turkey being cut (figuratively speaking).
You’re absolutely right, Nic. I had read that but forgotten the details. Thanks.
horrible movie, blatantly racist and contorts the source material in a way that makes it EXTREMELY tone deaf and insensitive. The real Matoaka was a child, who was abused, kidnapped, given an STD and was forced to conform to the “culture” of the settlers. The second movie is just as bad and doubles down on the insensitivity. They put absolutely no effort into learning anything about the characters or culture of Native Americans and it shows. Horrible movies would not recommend, whoever greenlit this is going to hell 10000%. Colors of the Wind and the animation were the only highlights of the film, everything else made me want to end it all.
I agree. I watched this movie because I read that white kids were taunting Native kids in a playground with “Savages! Savages!” That song says both sides are equally prejudiced. In the movie, white people think Natives are less than human and Natives hate white people for…no discernible reason. Not because they’ve already learned what white people are and do over the past hundred years or so, not because they’re being invaded, but Just Because all humans hate people who don’t look like us.
I never heard about any Native kids taunting white kids with “Savages! Savages!” And that’s because we all know this “both sides” crap is crap. You cannot demean a white person by calling her or him a savage. To me, this movie is a pastel-colored glorification of every stereotype white people have ever held about Native people, from savage to noble savage (not much of a gamut there, but it is what it is).
Racism aside (and that’s a BIG aside), there wasn’t much of a story here IIRC. White man comes to America, meets gorgeous and spirited Native woman, falls in love, goes away. Native woman has is gorgeous and has spirit, sings stereotypes (is blue corn a Powhatan thing? I associate it with the Southwest, but I’m no expert), falls in love with white guy, wants to make peace with invaders because of white guy, saves white guy, watches white guy sail away. I don’t care about the characters because the movie doesn’t seem to.
Shoot, I said “racism aside,” but that wasn’t accurate. There is no “racism aside” regarding this movie…or regarding the notion that Dances With Wolves was anything other than mighty whitey Tarzan nonsense.
Nobody settled VA in search of gold. This movie is a massive cluster and an insult not only to Native Americans but to anyone who cares about history or a well-told story.