Based on a True Story: Pocahontas

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With the Thanksgiving season upon us, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to go back and forth back in time to the days of Colonial America. Then I realized there’s not in point of fact a large number of movies about the actual Thanksgiving story. So I determined to go with something that, even supposing not about the Thanksgiving story itself, could transport us back to those days. And it’s also a great opportunity to do something we haven’t tackled yet on the podcast, a Disney animation.

In the mid-1990s, the animation team at Disney was on a roll. Tapping into their pool of talent, Aladdin animator Eric Goldberg and The Rescuers Down Under director Mike Gabriel teamed up to take on a new challenge: adapting a true story for the big screen in Pocahontas.

Timed to release on exactly 400 years after the real Pocahontas was born, Disney released their own musical interpretation of the story on June 16th, 1995. The movie boasted an amazing all-star cast including Irene Bedard, Mel Gibson, and Christian Bale, just to name a few.

With a budget at about $55 million to make, it was a smash hit in the box office as it raked in over half that in the opening weekend. In all, it made over $140 million in theaters. At the time, that put it at #8 on the all-time Disney list of box office results. Of course, as time goes on its dropped somewhat a bit—as of recording this, thanks to Disney’s acquisition of Pixar and Star Wars, Pocahontas is #65.

While it was certainly a box office success, Pocahontas was severely criticized by a large number of historians for telling a tale that the general public now imagine to be a true story when, if truth be told, it was almost entirely inaccurate with what in reality happened.

Note: This is a movie review that compares the movie “Pocahontas” with history. It is an original work, and contains spoilers. So it is intended to be read only after you have watched the movie of the same name.

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