Analysis Of The Movie Pocahontas

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The classic Disney film, Pocahontas, released in 1995 depicts the developing amorous relationship between young Native American Pocahontas and Jamestown settler Captain John Smith. When Pocahontas’s father,Chief Powhatan, finds out about their blossoming relationship he is quick to disapprove and later attempts to take Smith’s life for the supposed murder of a Tsenacommacah tribe member. Pocahontas ends up saving Smith from execution by covering Smith’s own body with her own as the Chief Powhatan is close to clubbing Smith to death. However the ‘historic timeline’ followed in the movie is notably different from John Smith’s own account in the True Relation, yet Disney still claims the movie is in fact, “responsible, accurate, and respectful.” …show more content…

The inaccuracy can be blantly seen by comparing the events in the film with what John Smith had recorded in his earliest literary piece, True Relation, which was written while he was settled in Jamestown. One notable example being Smith’s first encounter with the Chief Powhatan of the Tsenacommacah tribe, in which Disney portrays as John Smith being seized by the the tribe to later be impaled in the head with a club by Chief Powhatan. In John Smith’s True Relation he does not speak of any event that resembles the prior, instead Smith had described the encounter as peaceful, with the Chief Powhatan welcoming Smith kind words and the promise of freedom in the days to come. Furthermore, Smith, does not indicate whether he met Pocahontas during his encounter with her father or beforehand. Generally speaking no evidence can explicitly prove the climax of the Disney movie, John Smith’s execution, had ever really …show more content…

The real importance of the film is how both Native Americans and Jamestown settlers are rendered to clash culturally, yet the audience is able to see that both are imperfectly human. Meaning both are seen to act on fear, to hate the unknown, and have the capacity to act with compassion; so culture, skin color, language, etc. gives no advantage. Since at the end of the day humans are all ‘programed’ to react to similar situations in similar

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