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Disney's 'Pocahontas' exploits Native Americans

Disney gambled last summer with "Pocahontas." They hoped it would attract just as many adults as young children -- given that the film had a slightly different formula than traditional animated features. Considering the movie raked in more than $150 million, Disney didn't do too badly.

"Pocahontas" appealed to the 9-year-old-and-under crowd because of its animation. The film looks great. Whether Pocahontas is paddling in a canoe down the river or is running through the forest between towering gray trees, the visuals become a feast for the eyes. The computer-generated animation makes the rain, the river and even the dancing sequences look fantastic. And leave it to a dazzling, colorful cartoon to spark the fancy of any kid.

Aside from the animation, the storyline of "Pocahontas" aims for realism -- the gamble for Disney. The film, based on the colonial (or, more bluntly, "European-invasion") period, stresses that it not only deals with real events in America's history, but also places its characters in specific places in the country.

One of the musical numbers makes many references to Virginia. "Pocahontas," then, grounding itself in realism, eschews the more imaginative formulas of the past few Disney animated films, which took place at the bottom of the ocean ("The Little Mermaid"), or in magical, buried caverns in the middle of the desert ("Aladdin").

Disney had been riding a tidal wave of three immensely popular films. "The Little Mermaid" (1990), "Aladdin" (1992) and "The Lion King" (1994) grossed a combined $600-plus million at the box office -- enough greenbacks to fill Space Mountain.

The animals in "Pocahontas," though, don't talk. They don't even sing. Their rather ordinary, mundane roles in the film seem (at first glance) to set "Pocahontas" apart from the last three movies -- where the main characters were animals, or were at least subhuman (the Genie or the Mermaid). "Pocahontas" allows for an adult audience as well.

In fact, the film deals with a rather sophisticated theme: an interracial love story. Pocahontas, a member of a Native American tribe, falls in love with John Smith, an English "Indian" hunter; in the tale, Smith travels to Pocahontas' homeland to help in the plundering and marauding of the countryside. The film becomes a romantic tragedy in the spirit of "West Side Story" (with the Native Americans as the Sharks and the English as the Jets -- and the couple's relationship bringing the two sides into conflict). The film treats Pocahontas and Smith as mature characters.

With all its surprising attempts at realism, "Pocahontas" shamelessly stereotypes and exoticizes Native American beliefs and spirituality. Many Native American people consider the Earth sacred, as "Mother Earth." But the film stereotypes the Native Americans' belief in living close to nature when it portrays Pocahontas' dead grandmother's soul as inhabiting a willow tree. Pocahontas talks to the tree, which sprouts a ridiculous, comically pudgy face. The film skirts the details of Pocahontas' spiritual connection to "Mother Earth" and only gives us the preposterous "Grandmother Willow" as an explanation.

One realizes, then, that "Pocahontas" actually shares a similar "cartoon" quality with its three successful predecessors -- the Native American characters' exotic (as the film presents them) beliefs and medicine gives them the mystical, "superhuman" feel of the genie in the lamp or the mermaid who can breathe underwater.

When one Native American character winds up shot, a medicine man burns sage and waves it over his body in ominous silence. The film never explains what the purpose of the sage is, or what the man might be doing. Is he healing the character's wounds, offering him last rites, or helping to dull the pain? Because it skims over the moment, it gives the medicine man's action a kind of supernatural, otherworldly quality.

The makers of "Pocahontas" did not step around other important issues, such as the destruction of the environment; they embellish such issues. The English colonists dig into the Virginia landscape with their picks and shovels, searching for gold. The leader of the group, during one musical number, says often that the gold will be "mine" -- giving us a pun. He and his outfit are "mining" the hell out of the earth. "Pocahontas" appeals to its audience by addressing one of today's most pressing concerns -- protecting the planet.