Indian reservations

Rating: 6/10 (26 October 2013)

Just watched this film on a rainy stay-in Saturday afternoon and it fitted the bill nicely. A romanticised re-telling of the celebrated romance between English soldier John Smith and Indian princess Pocahontas, it entertains in the main even if it occasionally panders a little too much to the pre-teen market with just too many cute animals whose presence you think may, in true JarJar Binks style, have had more to do with spin-off merchandising than enhancing the narrative. The overly-idealised images of the dashingly handsome, heroic and muscular Smith and the gamine and exotic beauty of Pocahontas for me somehow manage to somehow belittle their characters, at the expense of credibility and I suspect, true audience sympathy, but in its favour, the film arrives at a not completely happy-ending which is to its credit.
Of course, being a Disney film, there has to be an identifiable bad guy for our hero and heroine, here personified by the greedy, avaricious figure of Lord Ratcliffe who has commissioned the expedition in a last-gasp attempt to strike it rich with the discovery of gold and also enhance his failing social position at court back home. Again however, he's too broadly painted for my taste, massively corpulent and duplicitous from the start. Likewise the contrast between the uncaring colonialists and the innocent native Indians comes across as clumsy and clichéd too.
Maybe I'm being too severe, as all Disney animated films seemingly must posit, for the kids as much as anyone else the big moral of good versus evil, but being based this time on a true story and not a fairy tale, felt more subtlety could have been observed in the telling.
On the plus side, the songs are good, with clever lyrics, even if you're not exactly whistling them after the film is over and the animation is fluid and engaging, although again i didn't recall too many "Wow!" stick-in-the-memory moments immediately afterwards. The voice acting too is mostly good although Billy Connolly's too-old and overly-recognisable broad Scottish accent jars occasionally.
Maybe I'm being over-critical and it's easy to slightly denigrate the film with reference to previous Disney classics, but while pleasant enough, this didn't feel like one of the studio's very best outings.