page_title: Pocahontas (1995 film)
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: Pocahontas (1995 film) / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: English: Roger Ebert, the film critic, giving an interview at a Chicago public radio station, on Sound Opinions program in 2006
context_page_description: Pocahontas is a 1995 American animated musical romantic drama film loosely based on the life of the Native American woman Pocahontas. It portrays a fictionalized account of her historical encounter with Englishman John Smith and the Jamestown settlers that arrived from the Virginia Company. The film was produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures on June 16, 1995. It is the 33rd Disney animated feature film and the sixth film produced and released during the period known as the Disney Renaissance.
  The film was directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg. The voice cast stars Irene Bedard and Mel Gibson as Pocahontas and Smith, respectively, with David Ogden Stiers, Russell Means, Christian Bale, Billy Connolly and Linda Hunt providing other voices. The score was written by Alan Menken, who also wrote the film's songs along with Stephen Schwartz.
  After making his directorial debut with The Rescuers Down Under, Gabriel conceived the film during a Thanksgiving weekend. The project went into development concurrently with The Lion King and attracted most of Disney's top animators.
context_section_description: Pocahontas received generally mixed reviews from film critics. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 55% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 56 reviews, with an average score of 5.91/10. The site's consensus states "Pocahontas means well, and has moments of startling beauty, but it's largely a bland, uninspired effort, with uneven plotting and an unfortunate lack of fun." Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 from top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 58 based on 23 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale.
  Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film 3 out of 4 stars writing the film was "the best-looking of the modern Disney animated features, and one of the more thoughtful" though he was more critical of the story and portrayal of the villain, ultimately summarizing that "on a list including Mermaid, Beauty, Aladdin and Lion King, I'd rank it fifth. It has a lot of good intentions, but a severe scoundrel shortage." On the television program Siskel & Ebert, Ebert repeated the same sentiment, while his partner Gene Siskel was more praising of the film. Both critics gave the film a "Thumbs Up". In his print review for the Chicago Tribune, Siskel awarded the film 3½ stars out of 4 commenting that the film is a "surprisingly serious, thoughtful and beautifully drawn Disney animated feature about the American birthright of exploitation and racism". He praised it for "sending powerful images to children about threats to the natural order", restoring "a certain majesty to the Indian culture", and for having "the courage that leads to the life-goes-on ending."
  The film's writing and lack of humor received mixed reviews. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly stated "With dismay, I realize that virtually everything in the movie – every character, every story twist, every song – is as generic as the two hygienic lovers. As a fairy-tale confection, a kind of West Side Story in Jamestown, Pocahontas is pleasant to look at, and it will probably satisfy very small kiddies, but it's the first of the new-era Disney cartoons that feels less than animated." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone bemoaned that there were "no funny, fast-talking animals – Meeko the raccoon and Flit the hummingbird remain silent pals to Pocahontas and make you miss the verbal fun that Nathan Lane's wisecracking meerkat brought to The Lion King." Desson Howe, reviewing for The Washington Post, likewise criticized the writing as recycling "elements from Snow White to The Lion King, with a father-child clash, a heroine's saintly pureness that transforms an entire people, a forbidden love, consultations with an oracle/shaman (in this case a tree spirit, voiced by Linda Hunt) and the usual sideshow of funny, fuzzy animals." While calling the screenplay the "film's weakest element", Janet Maslin of The New York Times summarized that "Gloriously colorful, cleverly conceived and set in motion with the usual Disney vigor, Pocahontas is one more landmark feat of animation. It does everything a children's film should do except send little viewers home humming its theme song."
  According to Chief Roy Crazy Horse of the Powhatan Renape Nation, the film "distorts history beyond recognition" and "perpetuates a dishonest and self-serving myth at the expense of the Powhatan Nation". Roy claims that Disney refused the tribe's offers to help create a more culturally and historically accurate film. In the Los Angeles Times, Angela Aleiss said that Pocohantas and other portrayals of the Indian princess rarely show her having anything more important in her life than her relationships with men. Professor and Director of Indigenous Nations Studies Cornel Pewewardy argues that the film presents damaging stereotypes of the Native American population. Pewewardy feels that the representation of Native characters, like Grandmother Willow, Meeko, and Flit, as animals, has a marginalizing effect. Anthropo
caption: Roger Ebert deemed Pocahontas inferior to previous Disney Renaissance films.
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