Life, unlike movies, usually lacks neatness and symmetry. But “Pocahontas,” the 33rd feature cartoon from the Walt Disney Studios, in some ways eerily resembles its first: 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
Like “Snow White,” Disney’s latest animated feature–which opened for a limited special engagement last week at the Chicago Theatre with a musical stage show and begins its wide commercial run Friday–is the tale of a beautiful, high-spirited, raven-haired lass in a magical forest. And though you couldn’t mistake ivory-faced Snow White for the new movie’s svelte, copper-toned, 1995 heartbreaker–whose story is based on the real-life Pocahontas’ 1607 encounter with Captain John Smith–they have broad similarities.
Each princess yearns for the day her prince will come. Each is surrounded by natural wonders and cute, funny, unfailingly helpful creatures. Each is menaced by rampaging evil.
And Pocahontas, just like Snow White, is heroine of a picture that’s spectacularly visualized, rich in songs and brimming with a characteristic movie mix of grand designs and good-hearted idealism.
Yet, what a sea change has taken place in both Disney and its audience in the more than half-century between these two pictures!
The brash and feisty Disney Pocahontas–diving off cliffs with Olympian confidence, defying her dad the chief, striking up a forbidden romance with Smith–is a world away from the fluttery-but-game, damsel-in-distress Snow White. If Snow White was fast asleep during her movie’s climactic battle, Pocahontas hurls herself between two armies in the last seconds before a bloodbath.
An improvement? Sometimes. But not always.
“Pocahontas,” for all its lush drawing, good intentions, terrific songs and star-actor voices (including Mel Gibson’s as Smith), struck me as less satisfying than “Snow White.” Or than any of the string of dazzling critical and commercial feature cartoon successes that Disney’s revived animation department began with 1989’s “The Little Mermaid” and continued through “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), “Aladdin” (1992) and last year’s all-time studio-box-office champ, “The Lion King.”
Why? Perhaps because of sheer ambition. Perhaps because of raised expectations. (If “Pocahontas” had appeared before “Little Mermaid,” it would have seemed a revelation.) Perhaps because the jokes have been de-emphasized. And perhaps because the production team, headed by directors Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, sometimes seems paralyzed, trapped by a sporadic sense of obligation to the history that it ends up travestying anyway.
According to John Smith’s memoirs, the real Pocahontas did rescue him from execution by her father, Chief Powhatan. (She later died in England, at 21, of smallpox, after marrying another British settler, John Rolfe.) But, since Pocahontas may have been 12 at the time she rescued Smith, the saucy, leggy charmer of this Disney cartoon–an aerobicized knockout who often resembles a cross between a Baywatch babe, a Barbie doll and the young Cher–is obviously bogus.
It doesn’t matter. Why would anyone go to a feature cartoon of “Pocahontas” expecting a history lesson? They won’t get it. The movie presents Smith as the reincarnation of Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood, not only a lusty adventurer (like the real Smith) but a superhuman acrobat and blond lady-killer.
Pocahontas, spoken by the Cree/Eskimo actress Irene Bedard and sung by Broadway star Judy Kuhn, becomes an impetuous supergirl and rebel miffed at her father’s selection of her future husband. (“He’s so serious,” she scoffs, nose crinkling.) Her best buddies, besides gal-pal Nakoma, are plucky, genial raccoon Meeko and the hyperactive hummingbird Flit. Her spiritual adviser is a talking tree named Grandmother Willow (voiced by Linda Hunt).
The main nemesis for Pocahontas and Smith, and indeed for the entire continent, is Smith’s superior, the arrogant, oily, overstuffed Governor Ratcliffe, played by David Ogden Stiers–who, in a neat switch, also talks for Ratcliffe’s obsequious valet, Wiggins. Ratcliffe, sneeringly patrician rapist of the New Land, sets his entire crew to digging up Virginia for gold as soon as they arrive.
The obvious Broadway Romeo-and-Juliet model for all this is “West Side Story.” There’s even a pre-battle song here, “Savages”–sung by both the British and the Indians–that directly echoes Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s great pre-rumble number, “Quintet.”
But somehow, “Pocahontas’ ” anti-racist messages seem more forced than “West Side Story’s.” It’s never a question of the new film falling into the caricaturish clowning of the crude comic number “What Made the Red Man Red,” in Disney’s 1953 “Peter Pan.” “Pocahontas’ ” Native Americans have lots of dignity but, aside from the heroine herself, no humor. They aren’t even allowed the dry wit of Chief Dan George in 1970’s “Little Big Man” or the Oneida actor Graham Greene in his recent movies.
Activist-actor Russell Means, a fiery presence, does the voice for Powhatan. But, as a group, Pocahontas’ tribe remains noble–and mostly male–abstractions. In their waxy way, they almost remind you of those deadly classroom film cartoons, where lantern-jawed drawings of the Founding Fathers confer earnestly and boringly on great issues.
Though Stiers has humorous moments in both his roles, “Pocahontas’ ” comedy is carried almost exclusively by three non-talking animal characters: Meeko, Flit and Ratcliffe’s lap-bulldog, Percy. And without a funny-talking animal or a funny Native American, there’s nobody to sing what is usually “Pocahontas” composer Alan Menken’s specialty: the big, show-stopping comic-song number, like “Under the Sea” in “The Little Mermaid” or “Friend Like Me” in “Aladdin.”
Menken has a new collaborator here, lyricist Stephen Schwartz (“Godspell”). And though Schwartz, like Tim Rice, can’t match the dazzling verbal ingenuity of Menken’s old partner, the late Howard Ashman, this score, with its infectious rhythms and throbbing big ballad, “Colors of the Wind,” is one of the movie’s glories.
The characters, however, aren’t–even though sexy Pocahontas is an animation triumph of some kind. Ineffective, too, are the forest backgrounds, which, vast and vividly detailed as they are, somehow lack majesty, magic and storybook grandeur.
But the biggest lack is laughs. Children, especially, know that comedy isn’t incidental to the success of the Disney cartoon features–a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Any kid also knows Snow White or Cinderella were less the stars of their movies than the dwarfs, the witch, Cindy’s mice and Lucifer the cat. Here, trying to focus tightly on Pocahontas and Smith and eliminate any objections to the portrayal of the Native Americans, the “Pocahontas” creators downplay the humor and the animals. In a way, they are ignoring the first rule of movie cartoons: Concentrate on the things you can’t do in live-action films.
The makers of “Pocahontas” should have listened to their heroine. They’ve made her whole tribe too serious.
”POCAHONTAS”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed by Mike Gabriel, Eric Goldberg; written by Carl Binder, Susannah Grant, Philip LaZebnik; edited by H. Lee Peterson; art direction by Michael Giaimo; music by Alan Menken; songs by Menken, Stephen Schwartz; produced by James Pentecost. A Buena Vista Pictures release; opens Friday at Lincoln Village, Water Tower, Webster Place and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:27. MPAA rating: G.
THE CAST
Pocahontas…………………………….Irene Bedard
Pocahontas (singing voice)…………………Judy Kuhn
Captain John Smith……………………….Mel Gibson
Governor John Ratcliffe/Wiggins…….David Ogden Stiers
Chief Powhatan………………………..Russell Means
Grandmother Willow……………………….Linda Hunt
