The studio has made noise about its bid at enlightenment, as witnessed by its casting of Native Americans... Maybe that is one measure of progress, or maybe it's just the most cravenly shrewd retailing strategy in many, many a moon.

| Dec 17, 2024

Unfortunately, though luscious to look at and painstakingly rendered, Pocahontas is an unusually joyless affair. The adventurous beauty rejects one suitor because he is too "serious," but this movie barely registers on the humor meter.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2024

For a film which has been heralded as painstakingly PC, Pocahontas's conscience stretches only to portraying American Indians as human beings which, in 1995, hardly qualifies as a particularly sophisticated perspective.

| Dec 17, 2024

You are still left with something fairly meaningless, although it's a pretty enough tale of racial reconciliation.

| Dec 17, 2024

A disappointment with saving graces, the Walt Disney production of Pocahontas proves especially frustrating in imposing slipshod animation upon a smartly written story.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 17, 2024

If you wind up at the new Disney film, keep your chin up. It does have its moments, although the best things tend to be incidental.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 17, 2024

Even if Disney's Pocahontas can be considered a failure in almost every significant respect -- and, regrettably, it can -- it is only in relation to their own, impossibly high standards.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 17, 2024

The landscapes make up for much. All those cataracts and sunsets: all those forests painted like living, breathing Japanese water colors; all those river-viewing crags that characters go to stand on whenever the screenplay runs out of dialogue.

| Dec 17, 2024

It was a fatal mistake to allow suffocating solemnity to eclipse what might have been a strongly felt story. What ultimately says most about this venture is that its liveliest character is a talking tree.

| Dec 17, 2024

If Pocahontas had appeared before The Little Mermaid, it would have seemed like a revelation.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2024

With one eye on history and one on the box office, Disney attempts to wrap a conventional fairy tale romance in a cloak of political correctness, and suffocates the life and humor right out of the movie.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 17, 2024

There is no "Circle of Life" or "Under the Sea" in this feature, nothing to leave the movie whistling, humming or singing. But once you get past the music, the movie becomes enjoyable family entertainment.

| Dec 17, 2024

This is not material for a Disney cartoon: but then neither is the sanitised fantasy we have before us. Who wants a cartoon that is dull?

| Dec 17, 2024

One might have hoped for more character detail and a greater sense of fun, but this is po-faced Disney, which draws the New World nicely but badly misses the colourful nonsense that we love even as we sneer.

| Dec 17, 2024

In the end, the film does get to you. It's Disney's darkest and most tragic animated film, even though it pulls back from telling the true historical ending.

| Dec 17, 2024

With every movie, Disney animation gets better. The action in Pocahontas is swift, the drawings are gorgeous, and the special effects are as exciting as the best live-action work.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 17, 2024

There's no getting around the fact that Pocahontas is a disappointment. But there's also no denying that such a judgment owes as much to the glories of its recent Disney predecessors as to its own shortcomings.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2024

Move over, Bambi. Step aside, Simba. That promontory over which the stag and the lion king once presided is permanently the province of that woodland princess, Pocahontas.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 17, 2024

The Disney animators have spent the past six years digging themselves into a hole... Each year they have released an animated epic that was better than the one before it. The string is interrupted with Pocahontas. Interrupted, we said, not decimated.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 17, 2024

Glorious to watch, fun, funny, sometimes slow and occasionally touching.

| Dec 17, 2024