Mike Gabriel
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Which can be put down to the fact that I've seen "Dances with Wolves", I've watched "Pocahontas" and many other movies which run with a similar theme and although it's well constructed it didn't feel special enough to match up to what "Avatar" delivers visually.
(Most) audiences who have seen Avatar in 2009 may accuse James Cameron’s screenplay as nothing more than a rip-off of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Pocahontas (1995) and Dances with Wolves (1990).
Essentially, Avatar offers a combination of Disney’s Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves.
Cameron’s script blatently borrows aspects of Dances with Wolves , Disney’s Pocahontas , and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest .
The story here is a variation on the Dances with Wolves template (or Pocahontas template, depending on your cinematic recall): A soldier from an encroaching civilization spends time with the members of the enemy, i.e. the people indigenous to the land, and, through the course of his interaction, gains not only respect and sympathy for them, but falls in love with one of their women ( Avatar digresses from the Wolves example in that the woman in question is an actual, true-blood native).
Moana’s grandmother, the human equivalent of that mystical old chanting tree in Pocahontas, knows the cause of this curse: It all goes back to Maui (PEOPLE Sexiest Man Alive 2016 Dwayne Johnson ), demigod of wind and sea, and his betrayal of Te Fiti, who outranks him as a full-fledged nature goddess.
"Moana" reminds of countless past Mouse House musicals, from 1989's "The Little Mermaid" to 1995's "Pocahontas" to 2013's " Frozen ," and on those terms it is decidedly commonplace, likable but without those extra shots of imagination and inspiration that turn a good picture into something truly special.
Disney loves their non-talking animal sidekicks ( Tangled , Frozen , Pocahontas ) and Alan Tudyk’s cowardly chicken is also responsible for a lot of laughs.
Moana also draws on a wrinkle familiar from films like Mulan and Pocahontas : The heroine isn’t just buoyed by her own inner strength, she’s drawing on the teachings and traditions of her culture as well.
As a depiction of foreign culture and legend, this is “Pocahontas,” without being patronizing, “Mulan” with funnier combat.
This film, under the freshman directing team of animators Bibo Bergeron and Will Finn, and visual effects specialist Don Paul (Pocahontas, The Prince Of Egypt), immerses the viewer with vivid color and awe-inspiring artwork from the first frame.
Using "Pocahontas" as a template to begin the adventure -- and completely side-stepping the fact that Spain's arrival in Mexico brought mostly misery to the natives -- directors Don Paul and Eric "Bibo" Bergeron (who both jumped ship from Disney) manage to weave an adventure that inspires ear-to-ear grins, even if it's not terribly original.
…he achieved that very pull, even against the Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest comparisons and criticisms…
Disney’s Pocahontas to be specific…
And in a career that goes back 33 years, he has directed only four films: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and, now, his version of the Pocahontas legend, The New World .
When last we encountered Pocahontas in movie-land, she had been Disney-fied to allow children to experience a sanitized version of her adventures.
The New World is, in its most reductive form, another version of the legend of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) of the Virginia Company, and Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher, devastating in her first performance) of the Powhatan people of what is now the state of Virginia.
While Malick's film has several striking moments and convincingly captures the kind of raw beauty that Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and his men must have seen when they landed in Virginia, "World" seems woefully unbalanced, spending so much time on externals that it leaves glaring gaps in the backgrounds of Pocahontas, Smith and Pocahontas' British husband, John Rolfe (Christian Bale; coincidentally, Bale and Irene Bedard, who has a brief role in "World" as Pocahontas' mother, also did voice work on Disney's 1995 "Pocahontas").
Years later, "Pocahontas" is brought by her new husband to England for an audience with the Queen, where she's declared royalty, and Kilcher seems more comfortable and suited for that environment than the wilds of America.
In The New World, the Indian princess Pocahontas, played by 14-year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher, a German-born actress of American Indian descent, has an even more crucial role.
And the five new songs by Stephen Schwartz (“Pocahontas”) and Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast”) ride a similarly fine line between parody and celebration.
The songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (the team behind Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Menken's much better writing partner Howard Ashman stubbornly remaining long-dead) are effective enough in the moment - and lead to the film's most transcendent scene, a Freed-style musical extravaganza in Central Park - but they're not all that memorable.
Songs from multiple Oscar winners Alan Menken ("The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin") and Stephen Schwartz ("Pocahontas," "The Prince of Egypt") and splashy, polished dance numbers complete the package.
"Pocahontas": Judy Kuhn, the singing voice of Pocahontas, plays a woman with kids for whom Prince Edward is "too late."
Speaking of excellence, the music is by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (the duo behind Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
But Disney deserves credit for half-pretending to undermine its foundational material and not just transpose it to the sea (The Little Mermaid) or onto non-white cultures (Pocahontas).
Despite a comfortably profitable run in theaters, Pocahontas was still regarded as the first significant box-office disappointment at Disney in years, and it was one of only two films to violate an otherwise uninterrupted run of Disney features each outgrossing their immediate predecessors that began when The Great Mouse Detective outperformed The Black Cauldron .
That Disney has received support from Native American groups is irrelevant -- how can the studio whitewash this story as a Romeo and Juliet conflict?
(Actually, it's closer to West Side Story, but never mind.)
And it turns out when you use Deep Canvas indiscriminately, it starts to look really obvious, making Treasure Planet a throwback in another way: not since Pocahontas has a Disney film suffered so from CG effects that aren't properly integrated with the hand-drawn animation.
The Little Mermaid (1989)
Directed by John Musker
influenced Pocahontas (1995)
Visuals Characters Plot
Disney's successes The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were behind them, and they hadn't yet begun to adopt that smooth angular style stemming from Chuck Jones, or the wide-eyed use of scale from Japanese anime.
And with "Pocahontas," Disney's 33rd animated feature and the latest in the increasingly popular modern series that has gone from "The Little Mermaid" to "The Lion King," the spell, though hardly broken, is showing increasing signs of wear.
Composer Alan Menken kept his streak alive with “Pocahontas,” winning Academy Awards for Best Song and Score, just as he did for “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Aladdin.”
The heroines of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , Cinderella , and Sleeping Beauty all have this skill, but Ariel of The Little Mermaid and Belle of Beauty and the Beast absolutely do not: Ariel is a sea creature communicating with other sea creatures, subjects in her father's kingdom, while Belle (who, like Cinderella, is not actually a princess) never even tries to speak to woodland creatures.
The dramatic challenge in the movie (as it is in " The Little Mermaid ") is that her father disapproves of the man she loves, because he belongs to a different race.
The film is the newest in a line of successful Disney cartoons: it follows "Mulan," "Hercules," "The Hunchback Of Notre Dame," "Pocahontas," "The Lion King," "Aladdin," "Beauty And The Beast," and, of course, the mother of them all, "The Little Mermaid."
Setting Deep Canvas aside, reluctantly - for if ever I have wanted a computer animation technology to take human form, so that I could tenderly make love to it for always, it would be Deep Canvas - Tarzan was initially put into active development right around the time that Pocahontas had underperformed compared to Disney's expectations, and this resulted in the first change to the thus-far successful Broadway musical formula that had been a hit for the studio so many times starting with The Little Mermaid.
Ever since Bambi's mother died, Disney has been giving us motherless children (Cinderella, Ariel, Beauty, Pocahontas) if not orphans (Peter Pan -- but it's his mother he wants).
It's a pleasant, cute sort of love story, but is less compelling than Disney's other savage-meets-civilization romance - that of John Smith and Pocahontas in Pocahontas .
When that title was followed by “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” “Pocahontas,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Hercules,” “Mulan,” and “Tarzan,” there was talk of a Silver Age in Disney animation—the Golden, of course, beginning with “Snow White” and ending with “Sleeping Beauty.”
Pocahontas, Mulan, and Tarzan each fit into the same rigid paradigm, yet they're respectively based on an American legend, Chinese folklore, and a beloved modern mythology.
Ever since the financial bonanza of The Lion King, Disney has been cranking out one forgettable animated feature after another, including such pedestrian fare as Pocahontas.
And then there's the more politically correct "Pocahontas," whose heroine's search for the one true path forges a temporary peace pact between her people and British settlers.
American Indian activist-actor Russell Means (“The Last of the Mohicans”) proclaimed it the best treatment of American Indians Hollywood has ever produced.
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Directed by Gary Trousdale
influenced Pocahontas (1995)
Music Visuals Characters
We also get five ho-hum songs, Jean Stapleton doing her best Beauty and the Beast-era Angela Lansbury, and Donal Gibson doing his best big-brother Mel as John Smith.
And it is--not as playful and crowd-pleasing as Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, not as thematically resonant as The Lion King , nor as all-around brilliant as Beauty and the Beast .
Disney's successes The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were behind them, and they hadn't yet begun to adopt that smooth angular style stemming from Chuck Jones, or the wide-eyed use of scale from Japanese anime.
Composer Alan Menken kept his streak alive with “Pocahontas,” winning Academy Awards for Best Song and Score, just as he did for “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Aladdin.”
Despite obvious similarities -- Menken's music, a heroine who doesn't want her father to choose her husband, and a small legion of animals -- Pocahontas is actually something of a departure from the recent batch of releases (A Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King).
Throughout are all the familiar Disney beats that started wearing thing around Pocahontas .
Instead, writer-directors Chris Buck (a veteran Disney animator with credits dating back to “The Fox and the Hound”) and Jennifer Lee (who co-scripted “Wreck-It Ralph”) give us a more conventional tale of two sisters, younger Anna (Kristen Bell) and elder Elsa (Idina Menzel), heirs to the enchanted Scandinavian kingdom of Arendelle (also a return of sorts to Disney tradition after the dutiful PC dues-paying of “Pocahontas,” “Mulan” and “The Princess and the Frog”).
And it is--not as playful and crowd-pleasing as Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, not as thematically resonant as The Lion King , nor as all-around brilliant as Beauty and the Beast .
Worse, since the overrated The Lion King had been such a huge hit, Pocahontas tries to copy some of its somber social significance.
And with "Pocahontas," Disney's 33rd animated feature and the latest in the increasingly popular modern series that has gone from "The Little Mermaid" to "The Lion King," the spell, though hardly broken, is showing increasing signs of wear.
And, as in "The Lion King," the landscape includes a precipice from which the characters can survey their domain - a rock jutting out into the sky, making an ideal pulpit for sweeping sentiments.