Pocahontas: The Legacy of Disney’s Greatest ‘90s Mistake

In the 1990s, Disney was untouchable. After a low period in the ‘80s that almost saw the animation studio shutter, they experienced a legendary comeback with a slew of critical and commercial smash hits that became known as the Disney Renaissance. Films like Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King cemented their status as kings of the medium with beautiful reinventions of fairy tales and classic archetypes that set a new standard for American animation.

But as the studio became more ambitious in their goals, they decided to try something new: a lavish musical that was also a historical drama about one of the most notable women in Native American history. It was unmarked territory for the company, and the end result was a harsh reminder that not everything can or should be Disneyfied. 

Pocahontas, the real Indigenous woman, was a Powhatan girl and the daughter of the tribe’s paramount chief, Wahunsenacawh, when she first entered history. According to contemporary records, she befriended some of the colonists who arrived in what became called Virginia in the early 1600s, most famously John Smith, who wrote lavishly of her heroics in saving him from execution. Following her death at the age of 20 in Great Britain, stories of Pocahontas became increasingly romanticised and fetishistic, depicting her as a defender of the white people who fell in love with Smith.

The real story, including her capture by Jamestown settlers and presentation to English society as a “civilized native,” became a fairy tale rather than another example of the subjugation and erasure of First Nations people. 

The truth of Pocahontas is deeply un-Disney, but Walt Disney Animation Studios and director Mike Gabriel, under the guidance of then Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, decided that it would be the great basis for a love story in the fashion of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Furthermore, Katzenberg thought it would be a good candidate to help the studio win an Oscar.

At the time this had turned into a fixation for a company craving industry credibility and prestige following 1991’s Beauty and the Beast becoming the first-ever animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture. Katzenberg wanted to win the big one, and a historical drama rooted in America’s origins felt ideal. But this still had to be a Disney movie, and that meant songs, wacky animal sidekicks, comic relief, a big over-the-top bad guy, and a sweeping romance involving an adult Pocahontas who the animators based on Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. 

Pocahontas, the movie they made, is a mess. It distorts history into a cruel parody, further exacerbating the bastardization of the real story of a girl whose legacy was torn from her. As a kid, you don’t necessarily pay attention to that because it’s, admittedly, beautifully animated and full of solid Alan Menken songs (and one of his lushest scores). You see the Errol Flynn-esque white guy hero and want him to end up with a heroine who is dressed like a supermodel. It’s all a typical Disney movie. And that’s the problem. This is a story that has no business being treated like a Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm brothers fairy tale. 

The philosopher Umberto Eco once described Disneyland as hyperreal, a place that took tourists back to a “fantastic past” and a carefully manufactured world that was both familiar yet not. It’s a place of “fake nature” and rules to follow. There nothing is truly real but still comforting in its own way. That captures the power of Disneyficiation perfectly: turning the prickly edges of history and culture into a soft and palatable alternative where beauty and joy come before the harshness of reality. So in Beauty and the Beast, for example, France becomes France, where the villages are picturesque and everyone carries around baguettes (and most people speak with an American accent). 

This is tricky stuff, even before you delve into something as sensitive as American history and the genocide of First Nations people. Pocahontas makes the deliberate attacks on a native population into an oopsie-daisy misunderstanding perpetrated by one greedy man. Get rid of him, and the problem is over! It understands that there’s nothing Disney-esque or worth an inspirational tune about a teenage girl being kidnapped, or how the Powhatan people saw 75 percent of their community wiped out by measles and smallpox brought over by the settlers. Listening to a cartoon Pocahontas and her raccoon sidekick sing to John Smith about how what we need is peace and understanding leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth, because we know what actually happened next. Disney did too, but there’s no McDonald’s merchandising opportunities in talking about that. 

Pocahontas made a lot of money in the summer of 1995 but it never became the Oscar darling Katzenberg hoped for (although it did win two statuettes for its music). It received a direct-to-video sequel in 1998 that further smudged away history, but its legacy is rather minute, especially when compared to its contemporaries like The Lion King, a movie Katzenberg ironically assigned to what he believed was the B-team (saving preferred animators for Pocahontas).

The New York Times later reported in 2023 how Disney has appeared to downplay the film with merch, theme park appearances, and other moneymaking opportunities (the exception being the song “Colors of the Wind,” which remains popular with fans and the company alike). If the film has any tangible legacy, it’s in how Disney tried to avoid its own mistakes the next time it made a film about an Indigenous community via 2016’s Moana. That movie was far better received in part because it wasn’t screwing around with firm history. 

Since then Walt Disney Animation has smartly avoided tackling real-life stories (although it still has a messy history with reimagining marginalized cultures for mainstream marketability). Conversely, we’ve never received a faithful drama about Pocahontas‘ life either. There are parts of our past that white-dominated cultural institutions are hesitant to tackle, to truly confront with honesty and stripped of romanticism. Maybe someone will eventually make that happen, but there’s a reason that Disney couldn’t and shouldn’t.