page_title: Pocahontas (character)
section_title: Conception and writing
hierarchical_section_title: Pocahontas (character) / Development / Conception and writing
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Pocahontas, wearing a tall hat, and seen at half-length. Around the oval lettering reads: "MATOAKA AĽS REBECCA FILIA POTENTISS: PRINC: POWHATANI IMP: VIRGINIÆ". Below oval "Ætatis suæ 21. Ao / 1616." Below: "Matoaks aľs (alias) Rebecka daughter to the mighty Prince / Powhâtan Emperour of Attanoughkomouck aľs (alias) virginia / converted and baptized in the Christian faith, and / wife to the wor[shipfu]ll Mr. Joh. Ralff." Engraving by the Dutch and British printmaker and sculptor Simon van de Passe. Courtesy of the British Museum, London.
context_page_description: Pocahontas is a semi-fictional character who is the title character of Walt Disney Animation Studios's 33rd animated feature film Pocahontas, and its direct-to-video sequel Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World. The character and the events she goes through are loosely based on the actual historical figure Pocahontas.
  Pocahontas, as the daughter of a Native American paramount chief of the Powhatan paramountcy, is the first American Disney Princess. Pocahontas is also the first Disney Princess to have two love interests. In both films she is voiced by and physically modeled after Native American actress Irene Bedard, and her singing vocals were performed by Broadway singer Judy Kuhn.
  Pocahontas is the seventh member of the Disney Princess line-up.
context_section_description: Following his directorial debut with The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Mike Gabriel happened upon an image of Pocahontas in a history book and decided that he wanted to pitch a film about her to Disney executives. Feeling that he was not adept at drawing women, he went to the pitch meeting with a Xeroxed image of Tiger Lily from Peter Pan (1953) which he added animals to. His one sentence pitch for the film was: "An Indian princess falls in love with an English settler, then is torn between her father's wish to destroy the settlers and her need to help them." When Disney executives asked Gabriel to summarize Pocahontas' character, he replied: "She's a girl with a problem." Inspired by William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, the film's directors Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg wanted the story of Pocahontas to feature two characters of very different backgrounds falling in love.
  Story supervisor Tom Sito, who became the project's unofficial historical consultant, did extensive research into the early colonial era and the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, and was confronted over the historical inaccuracies from historians. Already knowing that in reality Pocahontas married John Rolfe, Gabriel explained it was felt that "the story of Pocahontas and Rolfe was too complicated and violent for a youthful audience" so instead, they would focus on Pocahontas's meeting with John Smith. While the real Pocahontas was eleven or twelve years old upon meeting John Smith, she is depicted as being around eighteen or nineteen years of age in the film, according to her supervising animator Glen Keane. Keane explained that this change was made because a film wherein a thirty year-old Smith falls in love with a child would be "sleazy". Roy E. Disney felt that making the character older than the historical figure would make the film "more dramatic".
  Disney sought to consult Native American actors and a Native American organization in an attempt to accurately portray Indigenous culture onscreen. Elaine Dutka of the Los Angeles Times theorized that this decision was made due to the negative reception of Aladdin (1992) by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Disney denied Dutka's theory. Native American activist Russell Means who plays Pocahontas' father Powhatan in the film, suggested that Pocahontas say she was "honored" by a gift Powhatan gives in a scene of the film to reflect the ways that Native Americans talked; Disney changed the film's script in accordance with Means' suggestion. Michael Eisner pushed for Pocahontas to have a mother, lamenting that "We're always getting fried for having no mothers." The writers countered that Powhatan was polygamous and formed dynastic alliances among other neighboring tribes by impregnating a local woman and giving away the child, so it was believed that Pocahontas herself probably did not see her mother that much. Storyboard artist Joe Grant would conceive the idea of the swirling leaves to represent Pocahontas's mother. Pocahontas became the first Native American Disney Princess and the first woman of color to be the lead character in a Disney film. As of 2014, she remains the only Disney Princess to be based on a historical figure.
caption: A portrait engraving of the actual Pocahontas.
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