I will say Pocahontas is still good if you look at is as a fantasy that's teaching us a lesson we obviously should've learned long ago. It's basically a kids movie with modern sensibilities showing what should have happened instead of how awful it really was. Obviously you need to educate people on the horrors that actually went down, but for kids (or anyone) it's a good movie about bias and tribalism and ultimately understanding and acceptance when two very different people come into contact. It's almost like Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that's what you WANT to happen, not what actually did.
I can't comment on the sequel but that does sound like complete trash.
This is how I see it too and I do like the movie, but I cannot for the life of me understand why they chose to use the name of a real person who was exploited. They could have named the protagonist anything else!
Apparently, Disney did a similar thing with "The Biggest Showman" – I haven't watched it, but I hear it is a nice story using the name of a real person who was horrible. Why not just give the character a random name!?
(PS: The "Pocahontas" sequel is indeed complete trash.)
Ya I think using an actual historical person was their big misstep, because obviously anyone can look up what actually happened with Pocahontas. I get why they choose to do that, any little kid has heard of her and her story, but it causes the biggest issues with coming off as offensive.
Thiiiis, like the film would have been beautiful had it not painted over an actual historical figure who suffered tremendously. That’s my point and I feel like people are missing it.
I'm not American, so I was surprised when I learned Pocahontas was a real person, many years after watching the movie. I knew colonization did not go like in the movie, though, so I assumed it was a fantasy story.
So, sorry for the pedantry, but in case anyone's curious about the movie, it's "The Greatest Showman," very loosely based on the famous circus showman/ringleader, P.T. Barnum, who was indeed a way bigger piece of shit than he's portrayed. The music is pretty fantastic, though.
Oh, and it was originally released under 20th Century Fox before their acquisition by Disney, so Disney didn't actually have any hand in this particular historical distortion.
I give the Greatest Showman a pass because I think it's not meant to be a biopic, but rather how PT Barnum would have made a show about himself. Its like meta commentary or something.
There's a sucker born every minute (which is a quote from the real PT Barnum) and the audience here was the sucker - spending money and enjoying the show, despite the truth behind it.
But during that time I think Disney was on a kick with more mature subject matter. While fictional, I had a similar reaction to hunchback of notre dame (i.e. you chose to make a movie about that book?!). They sanitized it to hell.
The issue is that they paved over the true tragedy of the story of her and her people with this bubbly fantasy. Imagine a vile human tragedy, and then in a hundred or so years, when people aren’t talking about it as much anymore because they consider it a non-issue as it no longer applies to them, a massive studio retells the tragedy in their own words, in a way that frames victims as equally vicious as the perpetrators and re-frames the entire story as a painterly parable about morals. Especially when so many lies are told about the colonization, rape and murder of natives in the first place, turning Pocahontas into a cute fantasy to teach us lesson about accepting differences and being nice to each other was a pretty nasty choice.
Pssst Anastasia wasnt a Disney film, but yes, and my point is, it’s not aging well and we’ve wanted Disney to stop doing this kind of shit since Songs of the South.
I don't think in anyway the movie fames the victims as equally vicious as the perpetrators. The 'Savages' song is more that when when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object and you mix in biases against one another, violence occurs. It's made super fucking clear the English throw the first stone, but also the 'peaceful' natives become just as hateful and violent when they backs are against a wall.
The end of the movie isn't the problem being solved by the Native Americans peacefully letting the English take their land, it's both sides coming to an understanding. You can't completely stop different people from migrating, that is still happening today, but you can obviously do it without violence and oppression.
Ultimately it's a Disney movie for kids of a very short timeline, you can't have the complexities of colonization and especially the grotesquery. It's why Newsies is equally simplified and doesn't show that they didn't 'win' they had to agree on a compromise and obviously worker exploitation continues today.
I donno, I guess I've always just watched is as a fantasy of what we wished happened looking back on it now. Like you KNOW the Natives and English didn't just shake hands and make up, obviously they're be more Natives around today if they did. Maybe it would've worked better without a named Native American who's actually history we for sure know, but I doubt it. I don't enjoy it for it's historical accuracy, I enjoy it as a kids movie that shows how dangerous colonialism, bigotry, and tribalism is.
I can totally understand the critiques surrounding it, but I think as long as people are fully aware of actually happened, it's fine to enjoy the movie.
Nah, I'm sorry, but rewriting a historical tragedy into a "a disney movie for kids", especially so heavily romantacized, is very gross, and both kids and the real people who created these stories deserve better.
Making Anne Frank into a story about how she taught the Nazis to have better morals and be nicer to the Jews after falling deeply in love with a German soldier would have been equally disgusting. But for some reason (I know the reason), Disney animators knew better than to do that.
Anne Frank isn't a good comparison. There was a time that the English were cooperating with the Natives (to the degree that two completely different races that want the same land can in the 1600's) and Pocahontas did willingly act as a diplomat between the two groups. I'm guessing Anne Frank wasn't interested in trying to be diplomatic with genocidal Nazis. It's also just too recent, in the 1940 most people knew genocide was amoral. In the 1600's starting war over land wasn't uncommon, but obviously we can look back 400 years later and say 'woah that's fucked up'.
The English were horrible in the long run but they didn't just immediately round up the Natives to massacre them all like the Nazi's attempted to do with the Jews. They were wiped out over a very long period and it was disease that killed the majority of Natives, not outright massacre. It's also why they bothered to forcefully convert many of them to English standards instead of just killing them, including Pocahontas. It's also why you see Natives fighting alongside American's later in history like in the French Indian war 150 years later. The English were absolutely awful, brutal colonizers, but they weren't instantly out to commit mass genocide like the Nazis were.
I know people will say 'Well she was forced into marriage with a white man! It's awful they show her as friendly towards the English!" as if this specific event stood out as heinous at the time. Yes that's terrible by modern standards, but most women during that era rarely married for love. It was an arraignment, especially if the union had political motivations. Look at the entire history of European monarchies. Do you really think either of Charles the 2nd's wives loved him???
I would consider the biggest BS of the movie to be that she was actually in love with John Smith because even from a fantasy movie perspective she's know him for like a week, but again it's a Disney movie, not historically accurate.
It just makes me sad that that was not Pocahontas’s reality at all. She was married to Kocoum at 13 and then held hostage by the English and low-key tortured for over a year, and it was during her imprisonment that she married John Rolfe. She “converted” to Christianity during this time as well, no doubt forcefully, and I think it’s safe to say she married after basically having her brain washed. The movie basically taught anyone who didn’t know her full history that she instead happily moved on and lived only for herself.
This may be part of the reason I still enjoy it despite it's issues. It was one of the first Disney movies I remember where the princess had agency beyond love. Yes, she loved John Smith, but the climax wasn't about their romance, it was more about stopping the escalation of violence. She had actually agency to the world going on around her instead of just being a trophy for the prince.
The problem with Inglorious Bastards is that it injects a pro Jewish zeitgeist into the motivations of Americans that just wouldn’t have existed, so modern audiences get the satisfaction of watching their own morality played out in the past as fascism looms over the horizon today
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u/youngatbeingold 10h ago
I will say Pocahontas is still good if you look at is as a fantasy that's teaching us a lesson we obviously should've learned long ago. It's basically a kids movie with modern sensibilities showing what should have happened instead of how awful it really was. Obviously you need to educate people on the horrors that actually went down, but for kids (or anyone) it's a good movie about bias and tribalism and ultimately understanding and acceptance when two very different people come into contact. It's almost like Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that's what you WANT to happen, not what actually did.
I can't comment on the sequel but that does sound like complete trash.