Pocahontas Review

Almost everything worth defending here is a matter of design. Michael Giaimo built the picture around vertical lines and hard diagonals, so the Virginia woods look carved rather than drawn, and the animators use wind and falling leaves as connective tissue between shots. Glen Keane's title character moves with a weight and a stride no earlier Disney heroine had.

Then the story arrives. The screenplay takes the colonisation of a continent and shrinks it to a misunderstanding between two decent people, with Ratcliffe's greed installed as the sole cause of the violence so that nobody else need be culpable. Mel Gibson's John Smith is flat, pleasant, uninflected voice work, and the film hands him nothing to play.

Judy Kuhn's singing carries Colors of the Wind a good deal further than Stephen Schwartz's lyric deserves, since the argument of the song falls apart the second you ask what it is actually claiming. Russell Means brings real gravity to Powhatan, and the standoff on the cliff has weight because of him. The comic animal business with Meeko and Percy seems imported from a livelier and sillier picture, and the raccoon lands more jokes than any of the humans manage between them.