"Johnny Smith and Poker-Huntas" was the only interesting portrayal that I've seen

Rating: 2/10 (26 October 2007)

It was one thing for Disney to make animated features of self-proclaimed fictional stories ("Cinderella", "Aladdin", etc.). But it's going too far to make a fantasy story and try to pass it off as history. That's just what they do with "Pocahontas". While they prided themselves on treating Indians more respectfully, the Indians come across as noble savages (meaning how white people prefer to view them, even if it is a positive portrayal). The images are very modern: Pocahontas is a princess with giant breasts and a skinny waist (a Barbie doll, if you will), while John Smith is a hunky dude.
Around the time that the movie came out, I participated in a review of it on a local radio station. Having recently studied the history of Jamestown*, I could see that the movie got little if anything right, and so I challenged almost everything that the other reviewers said. The fact is that Disney - a corporation with kiddie entertainment as its main purpose - is not ready to tell the real story of what happened, and may never be ready to. As I understand it, when the English people first saw Pocahontas, she was naked and bald. The English, meanwhile, lacked any hygiene.
All in all, if you want a realistic portrayal of the events surrounding the Jamestown settlement, this is the last version that you'll want to watch. But Terrence Malick's "The New World" isn't much better, lasting way too long and plodding the whole way through. The best version that I've seen is unfortunately one of the more racist ones: the Merrie Melodies 1938 cartoon "Johnny Smith and Poker-Huntas", starring Elmer Fudd's prototype Egghead as John Smith. As this cartoon was directed by Tex Avery, it was naturally chock-full of sight gags, the sort of stuff that one would expect to find in a Marx Brothers movie or a Leslie Nielsen movie. While it did contain the average stereotypical portrayals of Indians, it was one of the cleverest cartoons that I've seen.
Now, I understand that some people might assert that "Pocahontas" doesn't have to be totally realistic. Maybe so, but the problem is that it claims to be based on historical events. I, for one, do not consider a fantasy pretending to be history very appropriate. In summer, 1995, Mel Gibson starred in - and directed - another less than totally accurate historical movie: "Braveheart"; well, that one was much more accurate than this one. Just avoid this one, OK?
*John Smith eventually had to return to England after getting injured in a gunpowder explosion. Without him, the rest of the colonists decided that they no longer had to do any work. Come winter, the settlement totally collapsed