Pocahontas is the titular protagonist of Walt Disney Animation Studios' 1995 film Pocahontas. The character is loosely based on the actual historical figure Pocahontas (1596–1617), the daughter of Chief Powhatan the Native American leader of the Powhatan Confederacy. Pocahontas is also a character in the Disney Princess franchise, making her the seventh Disney Princess, the first Disney Princess to be based on a real person, and the first American Disney Princess. Pocahontas is voiced by Native American actress Irene Bedard in the films and all related media. Bedard also served as one of the physical models for the character. Pocahontas' singing voice is performed by Broadway singer Judy Kuhn.
Development
Conception and writing
Following 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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". Roy E. Disney felt that making the character older than the historical figure would make the film "more dramatic". Disney sought to consult Native American actors and a Native American organization in an attempt to accurately portray Indigenous culture onscreen. 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. 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. Michael Eisner pushed for Pocahontas to have a mother, lamenting that "We're always getting fried for having no mothers." The writers countered that Powhatan was polygamous and formed dynastic alliances among other neighboring tribes by impregnating a local woman and giving away the child, so it was believed that Pocahontas herself probably did not see her mother that much. Storyboard artist Joe Grant would conceive the idea of the swirling leaves to represent Pocahontas's mother. Pocahontas became the first Native American Disney Princess and the first woman of color to be the lead character in a Disney film. As of 2014, she remains the only Disney Princess to be based on a historical figure.
Personality and design
Keane also wanted Pocahontas to be written as a confident woman, unlike Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989) or Belle from Beauty and the Beast (1991). The film's producer, Jim Pentecost, viewed the character as "the strongest heroine we've ever had in a Disney film." Disney spokesman Howard Green said that the studio desired for the film to portray its Native American characters in a "real" and "fair" way, in contrast to the "very comic, broad" and inaccurate portrayal of Native Americans in Peter Pan (1953). Green also said that the studio did not want the film to reinforce stereotypes about indigenous peoples of North America. The film's crew met with Ray Adams, the chairman of the United Indians of Virginia, and showed him ten minutes of unfinished animation and the song "Colors of the Wind" to see if they had portrayed Pocahontas in a way which would be more accurate to the Powhatan culture. Adams felt that the character's outfits were an accurate representation of Native American clothing and commented that Pocahontas was shown as "very beautiful and very intelligent and very loving, which the Native Americans are. We usually aren't portrayed as being loving, but the settlers would not have survived the first three winters if we had not been loving and helped them." Renowned for animating female characters such as Ariel, supervising animator Glen Keane was immediately tapped to draw the titular Indian princess. Following the demands of Jeffrey Katzenberg to make the title character "the most idealized and finest woman ever made", Keane first began to seek inspiration for his depictions for Pocahontas from Shirley 'Little Dove' Custalow-McGowan and Devi White Dove, women he had met during the research trip to Virginia. Keane recalled meeting the women:
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