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. 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. ĭisney sought to consult Native American actors and a Native American organization in an attempt to accurately portray Indigenous culture onscreen. Disney felt that making the character older than the historical figure would make the film "more dramatic". 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". 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Pocahontas is the seventh member of the Disney Princess line-up.Ī portrait engraving of the actual Pocahontas.įollowing 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. In Disney's animated 1995 film of the same name, she is voiced by Native American actress Irene Bedard, who was also one of the physical models for the character, and her singing vocals were performed by Broadway singer Judy Kuhn. Pocahontas, as the daughter of a Native American paramount chief of the Powhatan paramountcy, is the first American Disney Princess. The character and the events she goes through are loosely based on the actual historical figure Pocahontas. Pocahontas is the titular character of Walt Disney Pictures' 33rd animated feature film Pocahontas (1995). Pocahontas as she appears in Pocahontas (1995).
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