‘Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is!’
Black Elk, The Sacred Pipe
After Bambi, Walt Disney did not return to the potent theme of the American wilderness in his animated features during his lifetime. In the late 1940s and 1950s the Disney Company invested very substantial resources in making natural history films, of which The Living Desert (1953) is probably the most famous example. Jonathan Burt claims that these nature films ‘gave the company a new lease of commercial life’ (2002: 150) during a period when financial viability was often precarious. The success of this genre, both financially and critically, probably led Disney towards exploring wild nature primarily in the documentary and live action formats after his initial foray with Bambi. Apart from largely symbolic elements in the fairy tales, Disney used predominantly domestic creatures and settings for his animated features (Aristocats, 101 Dalmations, Lady and the Tramp, for example) up until his last major film The Jungle Book (1967).
The period after Disney’s death in 1966 was a major watershed in terms of changing public perceptions and environmental consciousness, however. Rachel Carson’s immensely influential book, Silent Spring, was first published in 1962. Carson presented an eloquent and far reaching case for intensive farming and industrial waste products having poisoned the environment, threatening many forms of wildlife with extinction and creating irreversible changes in the biosphere which would eventually impact on humans directly. This was the story of nature as environmental catastrophe, a story which has now become so embedded in our consciousness that it could well be seen not only as a ‘grand narrative’, linking diverse concerns and activities across the globe, but even perhaps as the ‘master narrative’ of the twenty-first century. From the late 1960s the narrative of environmental catastrophe, which had been embraced by counter-cultural movements in the United States and Europe, began to underpin a number of new initiatives that would have a fundamental impact on public awareness of the natural world. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were both set up in 1969, the year before ‘Earth Day’ on 22 April 1970, when ‘300,000 people across the US took part in what has been described as “the largest environmental demonstration in history”’ (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998: 46). In 1972 the ‘influential Limits to Growth report … suggested that aspirations of exponential growth lay at the heart of the environmental crisis, predicting severe food shortages, famine and resource depletion by the end of the century’ (ibid.).
The Disney Corporation did not initially respond to changing public perceptions of the natural world in the products they marketed to feed children’s imaginations. Indeed, one could argue that the inherent conservatism driving company policy in the wake of Walt Disney’s death tended to stifle creativity in its contributions to the film industry generally. Few really notable animated features were made between 1967 and the late 1980s, the films of this period tending to draw even more markedly than before on a deeply nostalgic image of childhood, seemingly impervious to the challenging social agendas that were being developed around race, gender and environmental politics. Of the animated features from this period only The Fox and the Hound (1981) deals in any sustained way with ideas and attitudes towards wild nature. Although The Fox and the Hound represents the forest areas surrounding the rural homesteads of its setting in ways that bear some superficial resemblance to Bambi, however, the film shows much more affinity with the narratives of domesticated animals that had become Disney’s mainstay in the intervening years. The fox hero of this movie is really a dog in all but name and colouring. The film does not explore the nature of wild instincts within creatures that can be trained for human use and company with any seriousness (in the way that Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Wild Fang, for instance, had done), while observations of natural history are much sparser and more peripheral than in Bambi. Ralph Lutts has argued that a conflict between ‘wishing to turn wild animals into cute pets and the desire to ensure their survival as autonomous beings in the wild pervades American society’ (1998: 15). During the 1970s and 1980s Disney was opting decisively for the ‘cute pets’ side of this pendulum.
By the 1990s however, the situation had changed. At the end of the 1980s, amid a fanfare of publicity, two environmental pressure groups were created in Hollywood, drawing in support from a number of film luminaries. One of the foremost of these was Michael Eisner, who became Disney’s chief executive and who co-founded the Environmental Media Association. The EMA tried to promote more environmentally friendly practices in the Hollywood film industry but also aimed to influence the content of film and television productions, encouraging environmental issues to be explored and promoted more intensively (Ingram 2000: 20–21). As David Ingram notes, the EMA credited itself ‘with an increase in references to environmental issues in films and television shows, both as incidental dialogue and as whole storylines. The organization provides an environmental research and fact-checking facility, as well as consultation on story ideas’ (ibid.). This initiative was clearly influential in relation to the themes and focus of a number of Disney films from the last decade of the century, most notably, from the point of view of this study, The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), Tarzan (1999) and Dinosaur (2000). Having tied his colours so firmly to the environmentalist mast, both Eisner and the Disney Corporation, perhaps unwittingly, invited an intensified level of (largely critical) scrutiny from activists and academics. But the, mostly negative, assessments of how well Disney’s practice matches its environmental aspirations do not necessarily mean that the impact of the films on audiences has been wholly detrimental. The focus which a number of important films offer on key environmental issues and, above all, their potential to engage and move young audiences need to be analyzed carefully to assess the impact of contradictory effects and meanings.
The position of the audience itself had also changed substantially, of course, in the half century that elapsed between Bambi’s release and the production of more environmentally aware animated features in the 1990s. The 1940s was precisely the time when the population of the United States changed from being predominantly rural to being based mainly in cities. Walt Disney’s own life path, from his childhood on a farm in the Midwest to an adult life spent working in one of the great metropolitan centres of the West Coast, was symptomatic of a larger social pattern of migration to the cities that left only around ten per cent of Americans in rural environments by the end of the century. Disney’s films had always traded on the effects of this social experience, evoking a sense of a lost world of rural and small-town American values that resonated strongly for many within his audiences, the majority of whom had lost their actual connection to the countryside only in the last generation or two.
By the 1990s farming practices had changed the countryside itself in profound ways too, as the drive towards intensive mono-culture production of plants and livestock, fuelled in large part by the agrochemical industry, altered rural communities and the very look of the environment. Hence, by the time The Lion King and Pocahontas were being produced, the meaning of both wilderness and countryside were profoundly altered, no longer available as actual experience within the knowable timescale of the preceding generation and seen only in mediated forms on film and television or from the windows of cars on highways. When Disney’s animated features finally re-engaged with wild nature then, they did so not with a carefully constructed nostalgia that evoked elements of personal experience still alive in both Walt Disney himself and many of his audience, but from still powerful but more distanced perspectives. The wilderness had become the stuff of legend and myth, of a founding history from the deep past rather than natural history still nostalgically available in the present.
The internal dynamics and contradictions of Pocahontas, in particular, need to be seen at least partly from this viewpoint. In Pocahontas the wilderness is seen afresh, in some quite powerful ways, from the perspective of both the colonists who were founders of the modern American nation and of the Indians who were its earliest inhabitants. In going back to this point of origin, the Disney film is able to explore that reverence for untouched wild nature which Bambi evoked, but did not attempt to explain. But the film is also, and perhaps more crucially, keen to delineate a version of the history of human interactions with the land that, as we have seen, were rendered invisible in Bambi. If Pocahontas, in the process, raises as many questions as it answers, then perhaps, given that it is produced by the largest multi-national entertainment corporation in the world for an audience whose relationship to its own land and history is especially complex, we should not be too surprised. In contrast to most of Disney’s middle period features, the film’s images engage with a vitally important topic with a cogency and imaginative force that make it worthy of serious debate.
Pocahontas tells the story of an expedition from London, sponsored by the Virginia Company, to found a colony in the New World. The expedition, which received a royal charter and instructions from King James I of England, was conceived as part of a strategy to contain and challenge the supremacy of the Spanish in the southern parts of North America at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Disney film takes a particular angle on this story, centring on a developing relationship between John Smith (a sailor of yeoman stock who, remarkably, went on to lead the colonists for a brief but important period) and Pocahontas, a daughter of Powhatan, the Algonquin chief who led a loose confederacy of Indian tribes from the coastal plains area of Virginia. Although these historical figures undoubtedly existed and there was an important relationship between them, Disney’s invention of a romantic liaison extends and greatly elaborates a nineteenth-century addition to the Pocahontas legend (Tilton, 1994). The real Pocahontas married another colonist, John Rolfe, only after she had been abducted by the English and kept prisoner for a prolonged period to put political pressure on her father (Woodward, 1969).
The freedom with which historical roles of the key players are handled in the Disney film, however, does not obscure the symbolic importance that the Pocahontas figure derives from crossing the boundaries between two conflicting cultures. In a sense, the romance between Pocahontas and Smith in Disney’s film, which has been heavily criticized as a sentimental departure from historical veracity, serves to articulate fundamental issues inherent within the heroine’s symbolic role of mediator. Other versions of the story from different historical periods have inflected Pocahontas’s potent symbolism to serve changing ideological needs in similar ways (Tilton, 1994). In this respect, the key event that imbues the story of clashing cultures with such imaginative range and flexibility is undoubtedly Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life. Pocahontas is reported to have thrown herself over Smith’s body as he was about to be executed by her father, persuading Powhatan through this remarkable, dramatic gesture to spare Smith and seek reconciliation with the colonists. The incident is recalled in John Smith’s memoirs and, though some historians doubt its veracity (Rountree, 1989: 121), it is a central element in all the major retellings of the story and is retained as the dramatic climax of the Disney film. Pocahontas’s acting from the heart to deflect the violence at the centre of cultural conflict suggests both that individuals can break with the assumptions of their social conditioning and that differences separating social groups can, ultimately, be overcome. Both these notions inform the fundamental ideologies shaping America’s distinctive consciousness of itself. No wonder then, that the Pocahontas story has been described as one of the key founding narratives of the American nation (ibid.).
The form of this narrative within the Disney film remains highly distinctive, however. Conflicting ideas about the natural world are given central imaginative significance within the drama and are configured, characteristically, as Manichean opposites. The benign aspects of this opposition are represented almost entirely through the Indian community, whose farming practices, attitude towards the earth and its life forms, and feeling of integration within the dynamic web of nature are seen as wholly admirable. These attitudes are summarized in the soaring lyrics of the keynote song ‘Colors of the Wind’, which Pocahontas, stung by John Smith’s patronizing assumption of cultural superiority, sings in a confident and challenging assertion of her people’s fundamental values.
The rainstorm and the river are my brothers
The heron and the otter are my friends
And we are all connected to each other
In a circle, in a hoop, that never ends
The English colonists’ assumptions about the land they are encountering are set off in stark contrast to this holistic life philosophy. Although the principal English protagonists, John Smith and the Governor Ratcliffe, differ in terms of the degree to which they are driven by materialistic goals, both share an unquestioning assumption of their right to possess the land they see before them. For Smith this possession is expressed as a quest for adventure, the land seen as a territory within which masculine will and desire can achieve its ultimate test and sanction. ‘This land is all I’ve ever dreamed of’, he says, as he leaps vigorously around its peaks and contours, his physical energy betokening mastery in a similar form to John Donne’s expansively ebullient image of exploring his mistress’s body in the line ‘O my America, my new-found-land!’
Ratcliffe’s attitude towards the land is a cruder and more direct expression of imperialist designs; driven by competition with other colonizers for the glittering prizes that will bestow status and wealth, he seeks simply to ravage the earth for its immediately realizable resources and is obsessed by the notion of replicating the Spanish discovery of gold. For both Smith and Ratcliffe, the indigenous people, conceived as ‘savages’, are seen as obstacles to be overcome or eliminated in their respective quests for different kinds of mastery. Smith is differentiated through his ability to respond to Pocahontas’s tutelage in alternative values, increasingly distancing himself from the colonial urge towards mastery as the film progresses. But Pocahontas as a whole would seem to offer an extremely clear and forceful indictment of imperialism, centring its critique on a decisive assessment of the environmental philosophies of the principal social groups involved.
In making explicit the conflict of values over how the earth is perceived and used, it might be assumed that Pocahontas is removing the mystique (expressed so evocatively in Bambi) surrounding the innocence of virgin nature. In fact, however, that mystique is merely repositioned, albeit in some quite complex ways. Innocent nature now comes to include the culture of the Native Americans, and especially the values of its chieftain’s virgin daughter, while the fate of the land, caught up in the trammels of human history, comes to be perceived, in a mode familiar within romantic melodrama, as conjoined to the fate of the romantic heroine. Pocahontas’s decision not to go off with John Smith at the end of the film, it is implied, springs from her deep-rooted commitment to her own people and to the land of which they are a part. It was the dramatization of these sentiments, no doubt, combined with the film’s critique of colonial ideologies, that led American Indian movement activist Russell Means (who speaks the part of Powhatan in the movie) to declare Pocahontas to be ‘the single finest work ever done on American Indians by Hollywood’, by virtue of its being ‘willing to tell the truth’ (Strong, 1998: 197). But what is seen in Pocahontas is not quite as straightforward as the ‘truth’ of how the land was taken over, nor even the ‘truth’ of the alternative values of the American Indians which, until recently had been marginalized, distorted beyond recognition, or forgotten. The revisionist history that is dramatized in Pocahontas may be welcomed as refreshing and vivid, but in some ways it is just as selective as the representation of virgin nature in Bambi.
Animated feature films are not intended to be scholarly histories and some aspects of the selection that takes place in such dramatizations are perhaps interesting, rather than of critical importance. A number of analyses of Pocahontas, for instance, have rounded on the producers for turning history into sentimental romance (Byrne and McQuillan, 1999; Giroux, 1999; Ingram, 2000). Reviews of this sort have tended to underestimate the emotive power of the critique of colonialist values that is embedded in the narrative form of the romance however and, as we shall see later, fail to acknowledge the way melodrama can operate within popular culture to shape audiences’ responses to social processes in thoughtful as well as impassioned ways (Williams, 1998). The form in which Indian culture is idealized in the film seems to me, particularly from the thematic viewpoint of this book, to be more problematic than the movie’s distortions of history in the direction of romantic melodrama. Some aspects of this historical distortion should perhaps best be seen as dictated by the need for strong, clear forms rather than strict accuracy in configuring the contest over values. Hence realistic aspects of Powhatan Indian culture with which contemporary Western audiences might find it hard to empathize – the public execution of warriors captured from other tribes that was accompanied by ritualized torture and the excruciatingly slow amputation of each of their limbs successively, for instance – are tactfully omitted.
In this respect, it is remarkable to note how quickly, in general, inconvenient facts tend to get lost from view as new paradigms for interpreting history emerge. Forty years ago Grace Woodward was still confident in praising the historical Pocahontas forthrightly for showing ‘an extraordinary ability to move from a culture grounded in sacrifice and superstition into a culture that was by contrast enlightened and sophisticated’ (1969: 159). Clearly she did not feel compelled, in shaping this judgement, to attach any moral weight to King James’s ‘enlightened and sophisticated’ burning of Catholics and ritual disembowelling of his enemies. Only thirty years later, Pauline Taylor Strong clearly felt equally confident in making a quite opposite judgement of cultural difference. In her analysis of Disney’s Pocahontas she argues that the aggressive ideology driving the English colonists should be distinguished from ‘Algonquian attitudes towards their own enemies’ (1998: 202). The Algonquian Indians, she concludes, ‘generally aimed to politically subordinate and socially incorporate, rather than exterminate and dispossess’.
Strong bases her conclusions on a rather selective reading of the excellent studies of Algonquian and Powhatan cultures by Helen Rountree (1989, 1990). Leaving aside the fact that Chief Powhatan had precisely ‘exterminated’ the whole of the Chesapeake tribe shortly prior to the English colonists’ arrival (which was, in fairness, uncharacteristic of Algonquian war protocol), the phrase ‘politically subordinate and socially incorporate’ implies predominantly non-violent resolution to inter-tribal conflict. Yet, as Rountree makes abundantly clear, ‘political subordination’ was ensured by killing off the entire male warrior sector of defeated tribes, either in battle or, as described earlier, through torturing survivors to death. The ‘social incorporation’ into the dominant tribe of the women and children who remained might well be seen as morally superior to the mixture of social exclusion, economic discrimination and periodic genocide that were the main forms through which Europeans secured dominance. But, ultimately, it does no favours to marginalized ethnic groups to repackage their historical identity with euphemistic phrases congenial to Western sensibilities that are currently dominant. The Algonquians were an extraordinarily tough minded people, whose male culture included the expectation of taking on, and inflicting, the most extreme physical suffering stoically and without complaint. To sidestep or ignore this aspect of their culture is to fail to engage with otherness and difference in any real way. The tendency is then for an idealization of ‘difference’, selectively filtered to produce an image of ecological and social harmony, simply to be substituted for ‘difference’ construed pejoratively as ‘savagery’.
This issue is especially relevant to the way ideas of nature are deployed in Disney’s film. Just as the violence that was a central component of Powhatan culture is reconstituted to fit contemporary Western ideals, so too the imagery of an environmentally attuned Indian culture in the film is carefully airbrushed so as to conflict with market orientated contemporary values only in the most limited ways. At first sight this claim might seem to be perverse. After all, images of the pursuit of gold for the European market and the ecological crassness that accompanies this goal are absolutely central to the film’s moral stance. Closer analysis reveals how many of the ecologically attuned images of Indians, supposedly in opposition to the crude economic drive of the colonists, are actually accommodated in more subtle ways to contemporary market orientated sensibilities however.
This accommodation takes two major forms. First there is an elimination of all overt signs of market practices from the images that are presented of Indian culture. Virginia may have looked like a natural paradise initially to the Europeans, but in some respects the Powhatans lived in an environment that provided a somewhat impoverished material base for their culture, especially in terms of the tools available to them for cultivation. Before European iron began to become available through limited contact with white settlers in the late sixteenth century, the Powhatans were essentially ‘a stone age people faced, in many areas, with a shortage of stone’ (Rountree, 1990: 7). Whatever else the Powhatans thought and felt about the invading strangers then, they certainly perceived them as a source of supply for materials and tools, which they valued and were arguably extremely useful to them. They were keen to trade with the Europeans for all kinds of ‘metal goods, guns, ammunition and textiles’ (Krech, 1999: 186) and showed themselves to be experienced bargainers who could strike a shrewd deal. No doubt it was partly because of this that the Powhatans were often willing to supply the emergent colony with food in the early years of its existence, and indeed without this support from the Indians the colony would almost certainly not have survived. But perhaps the most important commodity that was offered in exchange for European goods in this phase was deerskin. The status of Powhatan men in their own community was as dependent on their skills as deer hunters as it was on their bravery as warriors and, after essential food, deerskins were the trading item most sought by the early Europeans. Following in the tradition of Bambi however, in Pocahontas it is only the white man John Smith who is shown raising his gun to try to kill a wild mammal. The Powhatans are presented solely as a fishing/farming community and it is Pocahontas who prevents Smith from firing at the larger animal he has in his sights.
These points of historical deviation may seem relatively trivial in comparison with the film’s larger moral and political agendas, but their combined effect is not only to enhance the idealized image of the Indians as non-predatory, near vegetarians but also to imply that no market forces operate in the innocent world of nature that the Indians inhabit. This obviously increases the moral force of the contrast with the Europeans’ drive to acquire the specialized commodity gold, but it also serves to obscure the more normal operation of the market in fundamental items such as food, clothing, building and farming materials. Hence the film’s ‘critique’ of colonialist, or even early capitalist, values falls on the fairly soft target of excessive desire for the fetishized (and practically useless) commodity gold; the critique is thus limited and effectively blind to the cultural consequences of exchange and market forces in their broader, more everyday contexts.
This omission is made more significant through its conjunction with images of the Powhatan Indians’ supposedly pure, ecologically attuned way of life, since these images are subtly adapted to modern, commodity-based cultural expectations. Take, for example, the representation of the Powhatan Indian farming practices. Although the opening song refers accurately to the farming of maize, beans and squash, the main crop we actually see growing in Pocahontas is maize. The maize is seen growing in fields, where its luxuriant growth and fertile yields seem to accord with the notion of a natural, unspoilt, earthly paradise. More surprisingly though, given that earthly paradises are generally imagined as offering variety as well as profusion, the crop seems to exist entirely as a monoculture. No weeds, variants, weaker plants or other crops are in sight as deep green swathes of the ten-foot-high, regularly spaced maize are seen towering above the human participants at key moments in the film. This, in other words, is exactly what we might expect to see in a field grown for contemporary food commodity markets with the assistance of artificial watering, herbicides, insecticides and synthetic fertilizer.
In fact, the Powhatans’ farming practices were not ecologically unsound, but neither were they especially productive. They cleared land through traditional slash and burn techniques, planted a mixture of crops (maize, beans, squash) together and used no fertilizer. They used no ploughs either and left tree stumps in the ground, a technique described as ‘dig-stick’ horticulture (Rountree, 1990: 5). When yields lessened after a few years, as the soil began to be exhausted, they left the ‘field’ to return to its natural state and cleared more land. This was a sustainable agriculture for a relatively small population, but it required large swathes of land at any one time not to be used for crops.
The ecological sensitivity of the Powhatans is signified in the film through their relationships with animals as well as plants and the earth. But here too the emotional connection is conveyed more through the rhetoric of the songs than through images of what is actually enacted in the environment. Pocahontas follows the formula, set up in early Disney classics such as Bambi and Snow White, of counterpointing more serious action involving the main protagonists with comic sideshows involving smaller creatures. The racoon and hummingbird which are Pocahontas’s permanent companions in the film serve a similar function to Bambi’s friends Thumper the rabbit and Flower the skunk. But Pocahontas does not demonstrate the same care in representing a range of creatures whose lives are configured as partly independent from the principal characters. When the keynote song poses the question ‘How high does the sycamore grow?/If you cut it down you’ll never know’, the camera rakes upwards to the topmost branches of a tree whose species is hard to determine, but which is certainly more pine than sycamore. No attempt is made to shade images of animals in with elements of natural history that would gesture towards their autonomous existence. The heron and the otter may be signalled representatively in the song as Pocahontas’s ‘friends’, but (in contrast to Snow White) the Indian princess’s movements and gaze do not suggest any active interest in them. The otters function like fashion accessories, designed to set off and complement the grace and sleekness of the romantic heroine’s own body, while the eagles, whose eyes reflect Pocahontas and Smith in a striking image signifying the interconnectedness of all life, fly off their upraised arms as though the couple were a pair of feudal falconers.
Everywhere in Pocahontas there is a gap between words and the images that are designed to embody them. The words betoken respect for an animistic, spiritually alive, natural world that elicits wonder and is, often literally, enchanted. The images translate this gestalt into forms that contemporary commodity culture has appropriated for selling things. The ‘Colors of the Wind’ song lyrics, for instance, contain a well crafted, almost Buddhist, paradox that urges us to ‘discover things you never knew you never knew’. We are invited to ‘walk the footsteps of a stranger’, as a way of understanding, of moving towards a different kind of knowledge and empathy. The visual imagery translates this into a set of bear footprints that the camera follows till it reveals a snarling animal that Smith instinctively tries to shoot. The ‘discovery’, that Pocahontas leads Smith towards, is revealed in following the footsteps, beyond the aggressive standoff with the bear, to a cave in which young cubs are being reared. Smith, apparently, has blocked himself off from the realization that bears can be mothers too.
As a brief, exemplary nugget of experience for young minds to chew upon this is not altogether unpromising. Arne Naess has reminded us how fundamental the capacity for empathy with other life forms is in structuring our relationships with the natural world, and this empathy is likely to be generated most strongly through fresh perception of the universals of birth, suffering and death that are a common thread binding all forms of mortal being together (Naess, 1989). But Disney cannot resist turning this ordinary, yet potentially profound, emblematic connection into an experience more closely related to the cuddly toys that are mass marketed for children. Pocahontas completes her re-education of Smith by picking up the bear cub and cuddling its cute, furry form; her action encourages us to disregard completely the mother bear’s natural instinct – and almost certainly murderous response – in defending its offspring, even from ecologically sensitive Indians. The film’s editing encourages us to be oblivious to the nature of the bear’s interests and response by constructing the shot of the couple playing with the cub as a close up, leaving the mother bear’s response unimagined and out of the frame. What kind of ‘respect’ for nature is being taught here?
The transformation of wild animals into the equivalent of pets and accessories is sanctioned in Pocahontas by the supposedly Indian notion of an enchanted, animistic world within which all life forms are connected. Presumably Pocahontas can pick up the bear cub because she is ‘at one’ with nature in this enchanted sense. But the forms that this ‘enchantment’ takes are also adapted for a commodity culture in ways that can be subtly distinguished from the early period Disney classics. The dominant visual cue for the experience of enchanted nature, for instance, is colour. When the colonists catch their first glimpse of the Virginia’s richly forested landscape, it is not only misty but also tinted blue, signifying its difference from their expectations. This blue tint is intensified in the film whenever the theme of enchantment underlying natural life forces in the environment needs to be emphasized. Hence the blue is strongest in the space under Grandmother Willow, the talking tree who acts as spiritual adviser to Pocahontas and with whom she communes regularly. This signifier of unusual beauty and strangeness in the environment is complemented by the iconography of wind in the film. The wind is established as a key metaphor for Pocahontas’s essential mode of being, associated with freedom, fluidity of movement and change. It is also the force which guides Pocahontas in her moments of indecision, a transformative, natural energy which clarifies and deepens her understanding. The film signals such moments of connection with a transcendental force in nature that shapes destiny through the onset of mysterious sounding music and through swirling eddies in the wind, seen as distinctive patterns of leaves that are swept up in circles. But it is the colours, as much as the patterns, that make these swirling leaves distinctive, for the palette extends beyond what nature offers (even in the glory of a New England autumn) to include a rather striking pink. This ‘unnatural’ pink serves a double purpose within the film’s semiotics. On the one hand, as with the blue tint, it is a de-familiarizing device connoting enchantment. But it links also to the idea of girlhood and adolescent femininity within popular culture, from ‘My Little Pony’ through to young women’s clothing and accessories. Disney used bright, garish and ‘unnatural’ shades within its colour repertoire from the earliest period of its animated features as part of a popular, modernist aesthetic. But, apart from the gaudy, experimental kitsch of the ‘Pastoral Symphony’ sequence from Fantasia, these tended to conform more closely to natural colours in films, such as Bambi and Snow White, where sympathy with the natural world was a key theme. In Pocahontas, on the other hand, a more discordant note is sounded by having the exhortation to ‘sing with all the voices of the mountain’ and ‘paint with all the colours of the wind’ emblematized through sexy, pink leaves. Clearly we have moved beyond sympathy with the natural world in any simple sense here.
A clue as to where we have moved is provided by the form of Pocahontas herself, the figure who, above all others, is supposed to embody the ideal of sympathy with nature. During the ‘Colors of the Wind’ sequence there are moments when Pocahontas’s normally beige, deerskin, off-the-shoulder dress appears to have been tinged by the more exciting pinks that are shot through the landscape of her exhortatory song. And this is understandable, because Pocahontas is, in reality not one but two iconic modes of being. She is both a child of nature, ‘a ‘free spirit’ who embodies the joys of belonging to an enchanted and uncommodified world’ (Strong, 1998: 196); and she is a fashion icon, created from images of the exotic creatures who stalk the catwalks, a supermodel designed for the film to compete for the audience’s attention on a stage crowded with international media stars and celebrities.
Pocahontas’s body has, indeed, generated more opprobrium from commentators than almost any other aspect of the film. Glen Keane, who supervised the animation, claims he was instructed to ‘make her the finest creature the human race has to offer’ (Ward, 2002: 36), while Paul Rudnick, rather salivatingly, described her as a ‘Rodeo Drive stunner in a fringed, one-shoulder minidress, with a micro-waist and an infomercial-ready mane’ (ibid.). The prototype for her body is reputed to have been supermodel Christie Turlington and the blending of her image with white ethnic ideals is completed by a skin tone significantly lighter than that of most of the rest of her tribe. Disney often provides sexy outfits and bodies for its pubescent heroines, of course, but here the link to the glamorous consumer world of high fashion is more flagrant and specific than in previous incarnations. Moreover the glamour mode clashes directly with the film’s ostensible values.
The ultimate effect of pushing Pocahontas’s image so determinedly in this direction is hard to assess. Is this an example of what Baudrillard and other postmodern theorists have described as the dissolution of boundaries between what is perceived as ‘natural’ and ‘produced’ in the modern world, so that ‘nature’, as an inherently separate source of meaning, no longer exists? Or has Disney’s drive to maintain its commercial dominance within a global entertainment market pushed it towards overkill, creating ever more seductively market-orientated versions of the images it has always traded in, even when these contradict the film’s founding ethos? The effect then might be to create an unintended, ironic gap between the twinned images of supermodel and child of nature that the film purveys, a gap that would encourage a frankly sceptical response from resistant readers, even as the appeal of glamour holds others in thrall. In either case though, Pocahontas is unlikely to have an emotional impact that would lead viewers to become engaged at a deeper level, and want to take action later in life, as Bambi is purported to have done. Its contradictions – at least in terms of its ecological agendas – are fundamentally disabling.
Pocahontas did relatively well at the box office (it was the tenth most successful animated feature of all time according to statistics gathered in 2000) (ibid.: 114). But we need to know more about how viewers other than professional critics respond to the film to be clearer about its effects. Meanwhile, as David Ingram has pointed out, the image of this supermodel purveyor of deep ecological messages has been replicated remorselessly on mass-produced pyjamas, made by Haitian workers who are paid wages they can barely live on (2000: 53). There remains something deeply depressing about a film idealizing the philosophy and history of one marginalized ethnic group, albeit in a flawed way, whose spin-off products involve the thoroughgoing exploitation of another.
Animated features obviously do not have either ideological purity (if such a thing exists) or historical accuracy as over-riding goals. But some recent films outside the Disney stable indicate that it is possible to create popular sentimental narratives that are exciting and engaging, yet avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls of Pocahontas. In this respect, a comparison of the DreamWorks production, Spirit, with Pocahontas is particularly illuminating. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) has a relatively simple plot structure. It tells the story of a wild mustang horse, who is captured and taken away from his home on the mid-nineteenth-century western prairies and who tries, eventually successfully, to return. Like Pocahontas though, it establishes many of its key values and emotional charge through contrasting the attitudes of Native Americans and white settlers towards nature. As in Pocahontas too, the narrative is shaped around a defining moment in American history; in this case, the period around 1867 when there was intense competitive pressure to push the railroad system through the western plains area, so that the frontier region beyond could be developed. Just as Pocahontas deals with a founding narrative in terms of the identity of the nation, so Spirit explores critical elements in the myth of ‘Frontier’, which has played such a central role in defining aspirations and goals throughout American history. But if the historical moment has been moved on a stage in Spirit, then so too has the range of strategies that is deployed in depicting human relationships with the natural world.
Before considering these in more detail though, it is important to recognize how important the idea of ‘Frontier’ has been within American consciousness. Richard Slotkin explains this with particular eloquence and succinctness:
The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this myth-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and “progressive” civilization. The original ideological task of the Myth was to explain and justify the establishment of the American colonies; but as the colonies expanded and developed, the Myth was called on to account for our rapid economic growth, our emergence as a powerful nation-state, and our distinctively American approach to the socially and culturally disruptive processes of modernization. (1998: 10)
If the setting of Spirit is a particular phase and space in the development of the Frontier, then the most potent, underlying theme that the film works on is precisely what Slotkin calls ‘the socially and culturally disruptive processes of modernization’.
The life of the protagonist stallion, while in enforced exile from its homeland prairies, is split into three main episodes in the film. During the first phase, Spirit is taken to a US army fort to be ‘broken’ for use by the cavalry. In the second phase the horse escapes from the fort with an Indian who has also been taken prisoner and begins a new life among other Indian horses in one of the settlements of the Lakota tribe, who were a branch of the larger Sioux nation. In a final stage, after his release from the Indian camp, the stallion is recaptured by a gang working for the railroad company and set to work hauling trains over a mountain pass that cannot yet be laid with rails.
No overt attempt is made to explain that these episodes may have an underlying connection in the film – this is a ‘horse’s eye’ view and the narrative develops in picaresque fashion – but in fact they are all powerfully linked to the ‘disruptive processes of modernisation’. One of the main roles of the US cavalry in this region was to protect the railroad companies’ building programme from attack by Indians who feared – rightly – that this would have catastrophic consequences for their communities and way of life. The Indians, like the wild horses, were dependent on the expanses of the prairies remaining open, amenable to migration and to the needs of the grazing herds of wildlife. Within a few short years of the first railroad through the region being completed in 1867, the plains would be split again and again into discrete areas by a succession of competing railroads. White hunters would flood in on the new transport systems from the east. By 1883 they had virtually exterminated the buffalo herds from the entire plains region. As Shepard Krech III explains vividly; ‘Hunters flooded in; unskilled they wasted three to five times the number they killed. The carnage defied description: four to five million killed in three years alone’ (1999: 141). Since Plains Indian culture was built around the buffalo, which tribes depended on for food, tepee building and clothing, the effect was devastating. In a poignant comment on the last phases of the buffaloes’ slaughter, Krech notes how the Indians, ‘confined to reservations and distressed from hunger’, were driven to compete with white hunters and take part in the killing themselves ‘until the bitter end’ (ibid.). The feelings they were left with when the last buffalo had been slaughtered can barely be imagined.
Although the feeling that something of vital importance has been lost from the deep past is central to Spirit however, the film works by leaving gaps within which connections and understanding of historical process can be made, rather than trying to explain. In this respect it is a much less didactic film than Pocahontas, leaving the viewer with more space and imaginative work to do. This effect is facilitated by centring the story on an animal representing ‘wild nature’ rather than on a human embodying sympathy with wild nature. In this way the history can be represented elliptically, in nuanced and relatively open forms, whilst the emotional centre of the narrative takes its bearings more fundamentally from the natural world. Spirit, indeed, takes the narrative strategy deployed so effectively in Bambi even further in this respect. Like Bambi, this is the story of a wild animal seen from the animal’s point of view. But Spirit does not rely so directly on the anthropomorphic device of the animal speaking. The horses in Spirit express themselves by making animal noises and gestures, while the storyline is developed through a few linking voice-overs that deliver the equine protagonist’s framing reflections on what has happened in a retrospective mode.
Competing ideas about human relationships with the natural world are left largely implicit within Spirit, rather than being spelled out in keynote songs. Different values are shown largely through contrasts between the way the Lakota Indians are shown relating to the horse, and its treatment under the regime of the cavalry commander and later the overseers of the railroad construction. The railroad workers treat their horses in a purely utilitarian way, as instruments to be used in order to get a job done as quickly as possible. The cavalry commander takes a more particular, personalized interest in the wild horse, but this interest is characterized by egotism, the challenge the horse offers to the commander’s professional pride, and his desire for mastery. Hence the cavalry commander’s attempt to break the horse in is accompanied by a particularly brutal regime of starvation and water deprivation over a three-day period, designed to weaken the animal and break its spirit. The Indians’ treatment of the horse, by contrast, is kinder, based on empathy and identification with the creature. The portrait no doubt contains elements of idealization of historical Indian practice in the same way as Pocahontas. Chief Buffalo Child stated that, within his tribe’s traditions, being gentle too early was recognized as an ineffective way of handling horses: ‘a wild horse … will not react to quiet kindliness at first. He must be treated gruffly – but not harshly – and then when he is on a touching acquaintance with man, kindness is the quickest way to win his affections’ (Roe, 1955: 265). Spirit’s Indian captor-cum-comrade shows no signs of being anything other than kindly, and never attempts the commonest Indian form of horse-breaking, which was to mount the animal as it was held between two other horses in a river or area of boggy ground, where its efforts to lose its rider would quickly result in exhaustion. However, at least one area of difference between Plains Indian and European horse husbandry represented in the film is both crucial and realistic. Indian horses, once they had accepted humans, roamed free; they were generally neither tethered nor fenced. The plains Indians were astonishingly skilful riders who relied primarily on sympathy and mutuality between human and animal during the often arduous routines of training. As Frank Roe notes, there ‘can be no parallel between the accomplishments of an animal living in more than partial freedom, which it could regain in toto almost at will, and the … performances of the hapless victims of fear and the lash’ (ibid.). In this respect particularly, the horse is an apt and powerful figure for exploring ideas of freedom in terms of human relations with the natural world.
If Spirit is in many respects more successful than Pocahontas in dramatizing and exploring ideas about the natural world however, its handling of the historical dimensions of these ideas is still not unproblematic. Like Pocahontas, Spirit allows itself some licence in incorporating the factual underpinning of its storyline. The wild horse, for instance, is represented from the start of the film as synonymous with the natural, unspoiled life of the prairie region before human intervention. As in Bambi, thousands of years of interaction between Indians and the animal protagonists’ environment is occluded by invoking this mythic ideal of a natural world wholly separate from human beings. The horse, moreover, is a peculiarly inapt symbol for untouched nature in this context. Horses had not existed in North America for thousands of years before the Europeans came and these ‘natural’ inhabitants of the plains environment were almost certainly very recent descendants of imported Spanish animals that had either escaped or been released in the early sixteenth century (ibid.). This inaccuracy is perhaps less important in itself than for its contribution to a fundamental contradiction within the structure of feeling of the film as a whole, however. Seen in its historical role, the horse is not a symbol of a pure, natural past; rather it is a symptom, or facet, of the very forces of conquest, modernization and change that the film portrays as threatening both the wilderness and the qualities of freedom that the idea of wilderness represents. Hence the elegiac mood that frames the film’s central narrative feels uneasy, even though it may be provocative of thought. Since the elegy is focused on the imagined life of a creature that was imported, rather than ‘natural’, brought in precisely to secure the colonists’ version of progress, it is not clear where the film stands in relation to what has been lost, or what exactly the audience’s sense of connection to imagined wilderness that is the movie’s heartland may be. The film seems to acknowledge this uncertainty as to how viewers may ultimately relate to the Myth of Frontier being reconfigured not as ‘progress’ but as ‘lost purity and freedom’. As the opening voice-over puts it; ‘They say the mustang is the spirit of the Old West. Whether the West was won or lost in the end you’ll have to decide for yourself’.
This equivocation may be a sign of the open quality of the narrative referred to earlier, but it also expresses confusion about what meaning the idea of wilderness now has for us. The film’s claim to tell a truth that ‘cannot be found in a book’ rests on its central (and scrupulously observed) conceit of being a history of the plains region not written (by humans) from ‘the saddle of a horse’ but rather told as if ‘from the heart of a one’. But the animal-centred conceit means there can be no directing consciousness of the larger histories underlying this story; from the horse’s viewpoint the concept of ‘Old West’ is a human projection that obscures more fundamental truths lying beyond the reach of human imperatives and historical consciousness. As the horse narrator explains at the start of the film:
I was born here, in the land that would come to be called the Old West. But to my mind the land was ageless – it had no beginning and no end, no boundary between earth and sky. Like the wind in the buffalo grass we belonged here; we would always belong here.
This assertion of a natural sense of belonging that appears to transcend time operates as a powerful challenge to assumptions of human agency and ownership – of the unquestioned right to do what we want with the land. But it also obscures and mystifies, so that the processes that have made the land what it is fall curiously out of focus. We are offered an image of the wind in the buffalo grass as eternal, so that our consciousness of what actually happened to the buffalo becomes blurred; we are reminded of the wild origins of the horse as an unalienable marker of its identity, but the long process of the horse’s evolution in association with human cultures (both Indian and European) is elided. The film’s ambiguities seem to express contradictions that have become particularly pressing within contemporary consciousness; we remain rooted to the economic imperatives of progress and growth, yet are increasingly aware of half severed connections to older ideals that are embodied within images of nature.
In this respect, Spirit is a particularly interesting example of what Leo Braudy has identified as the ‘genre of nature’, a genre which he sees as evolving significantly new cinematic forms from the early 1990s. Braudy sees the films emerging within this new genre as sharing a suspicion that technological solutions to social and environmental problems, embodied in a narrative of progress, no longer work. Instead such films focus on ‘primitives’ – aborigines, children, animals – whose primary quality is an innocence, which established society is hostile to and threatens. As Braudy puts it, ‘the phenomenon that science and technology seek to control is innocence, which can never open its secrets, because telling isn’t what is does. Innocence just is’ (1998: 301). What then emerges is an ‘assumption that only an untouched and perhaps impossible freshness will allow a new beginning’ (ibid.: 292). Braudy’s theory provides a useful context for understanding Spirit’s dominant strategy of showing, rather than telling, while the ambiguities surrounding its elegiac feeling for an ‘impossible freshness’ in the prairie wilderness perhaps make more sense seen as part of a desire for a ‘new beginning’ that is as widespread as it is difficult to conceive in realistic form.
In at least one further respect, however, Pocahontas and Spirit part company from each other. For while the framing sentiment of elegy in Spirit implies rupture – a longing for something that cannot now be recovered – the seemingly anti-romantic ending of Pocahontas is actually much more sentimental. Pocahontas’s decision not to go back to England with John Smith but instead to remain with her own people might at first sight appear to resist the easy sentiment of the traditional romantic union. But, in fact, the ending suggests that the animistic harmony with nature that the Algonquin Indians represent in the film is – precisely – recoverable. Pocahontas’s commitment to the way of life of her own people, despite an openness to Western culture that has culminated in passionate love for the figure embodying its heroic ideals, suggests the possibility that her values may survive both the force and attraction of the colonizers. In another kind of embodiment, keeping alive the possibility of recovering such values might become radical or utopian. Within Disney’s Pocahontas, however, so complete is the absorption of the iconic heroine within the commodified imagery of the West that this brave stand can only be seen as sentimental. The comforting illusion that our rift with nature might be healed through the recovery of Native American values is sustained in contemporary film narratives only by obscuring or eliding the actual histories within which those values have been formed.
It is interesting, in this respect, that Disney’s most recent offering within the new ‘genre of nature’ should have sidestepped the problematic terrain of colonial history altogether, setting itself in a pre-historic, Canadian wilderness, in a period at the end of the last ice age when ‘mammoths walked the earth’. Brother Bear (2003) is in many ways a less artistically accomplished film than Pocahontas (though it was nominated for an Oscar as Best Animated Feature in 2004). The film is built around a promising story concept, however, that engages – potentially – with a number of the central issues we have been considering.
A headstrong young Inuit, Kenai, takes revenge on a bear that has killed his brother and is taught a lesson by the spirit ancestors who turn him into a bear. This plotline – which attempts to develop moral and spiritual awareness from a particularly dramatic incorporation of the common animation device of seeing the world from an animal’s point of view – has the potential for engaging seriously with contemporary ecological agendas. Despite some ravishing landscape shots however, and a compelling scene in which Kenai is initially transformed into a bear, the opportunities are rather wasted and the moral agenda becomes ultimately facile. In part this is due to weaknesses in the script (the humour is often flat-footed – literally in the case of the two grotesquely stupid moose) and the somewhat pedestrian nature of the songs, which carry little of the emotional charge and energy displayed in many of the classic Disney lyrics. But it is also because the animation team is not sensitive enough to the qualities of the natural world – even as displayed in a comic, fantasy mode – to allow the moral agendas to be grafted onto the comedy and to work properly. Unlike in Bambi, the film shows no interest in animal behaviour and movement beyond the most superficial elements required for the plot. Nor is there any real sense of awe or beauty in the way the natural environment is depicted, such as is displayed intermittently in DreamWorks’ Spirit and often brilliantly in the work of the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Instead the main protagonist behaves consistently like a bemused human dressed up in a bear outfit after his transformation, while every detail of the other animals is so remorselessly anthropomorphized that the creatures are never allowed to become more than empty ciphers for human types, or sidekicks for the gags. The film thus picks up on the worst elements of eco-kitsch (as the historian Simon Schama once memorably described it) in Pocahontas, without the latter film’s more genuine sense of conviction in its moral and political agendas. This flaw is particularly damaging in Brother Bear, where a key element in the moral fable is that Kenai should learn to understand and respect the natural world he has previously placed himself arrogantly above. The film’s rhetoric tries to persuade us that Kenai has gone on a journey where he discovers love for his fellow creatures – as his totem figure of the ‘loving bear’ prescribes. The film renders this ‘love’ as cuddly and charming, however, without giving enough force to the sense of animal nature as different, as well as connected, to the human.
The ending to Brother Bear enacts closure in a form that seems to have unconscious parallels with Pocahontas though, and is perhaps more challenging. Having ‘proved himself’, by discovering love for his fellow animals, Kenai is given the opportunity to return to his human form. Most audiences anticipate that the film will end with Kenai re-united with his real human brother – perhaps after a last solicitous cuddle with the bear cub, Koda, who has helped him towards enlightenment. In fact, Kenai elects to remain a bear, on the grounds that his animal ‘brother’ needs him. This is a move that breaks with the conventional expectations of the genre in a similar fashion to Pocahontas choosing her tribe over the romantic claims of John Smith. This is perhaps just as open to the charge of sentimentality as Pocahontas is, but it does produce a more thought provoking dimension, at least for the end of the moral fable. What it seems to illustrate is that the option of prioritizing nature over human allegiances – previously unimaginable within sentimental adventure narratives for children – has now become viable within the fantasies that feed our thoughts and feelings.