Pretty and with good music, but not very good overall

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2012)

After the huge success of The Lion King and the three films preceding it, Pocahontas effectively ended Disney's Renaissance in 1995. They've never been able to recover from it, relying instead on Pixar to carry the mantle (although I would argue that Disney has had a handful of films in the past ten years that rival, and are probably far better than their run from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King). Pocahontas has a few things going for it. Honestly, it's one of Disney's best looking films. The colors in particular are gorgeous. And the music is good, too. Not great, but I like it far better than the music of the The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast, both of which have horribly overrated music. The music of Pocahontas did, in fact, win two Oscars, for both score and Best Song ("The Colors of the Wind"). While I can sit through a film with such merits, the bad stuff really weighs it down. Disney really shouldn't have tackled a historical story, no matter how mythologized. And they REALLY shouldn't have added cutesy animal sidekicks. That's the biggest crime of the film by far, the raccoon and hummingbird that follow Pocahontas around, getting into trouble, and the bad guy's pug, all far too anthropomorphized. If Disney had attempted to make a more mature movie, it might have worked, but then maybe they couldn't have padded out the runtime with the animal antics. The film also suffers from a good amount of mid-90s political correctness. The conflict boils down to "Argh! We're the evil white people and all we want to do is kill savages!" and "Ugh. We're noble savages who like corn, or, as we call it, maize. We love animals and nature and crap. Look, there's a talking, magical tree over there. And check out my daughter's pet raccoon! Isn't it funny?" It's all terribly insulting. Still better than the boring The Lion King.