Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World is Too Boring to Be the Worst Disney Movie

Okay, okay… why are we covering Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World?

Because! I was forced to watch it like 100 times in a few months! And I deserve recompense for the brain space it took up!

But for real, if you want more info about why and how this came to be, the episode includes a looooong rant about the daycare center and its various… shortcomings. In the meantime, we’re going to talk about the main event: Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World. 

Was it remotely interesting? Notable? Entertaining?

Not at all! In fact, I couldn’t even stand by the claim that this is the worst Disney movie ever made-- it’s not even interesting enough to defend that title! It was simply egregiously boring and completely unnecessary. It adds nothing to our culture! It teaches no lesson! It’s just a romcom that inexplicably uses historical characters in a completely ahistorical way!

First of all, the movie’s run time is 72 minutes, and it includes so much ridiculous padding (i.e. raccoon and dog antics) that the actual plot content is maybe 30 minutes long. If that isn’t evidence that a movie shouldn’t exist, I don’t know what is.

Start to finish, the plot is just that Pocahontas is sad about John Smith dying (spoiler alert: he’s not dead or whatever), the king of England wants to send an armada to go to war with the Powhatan tribe, and John Rolfe (suddenly introduced because the movie cares about THAT, I guess) has to convince Pocahontas to travel ‘cross the pond to discuss a peace treaty between England and the tribes. The rest of the film is just various English folks trying to assimilate Pocahontas to British life-- and IT’S FRAMED AS AN OVERALL POSITIVE. Sure, they hint at it being emotionally hard for her to balance the English traditions and her tribe’s traditions, but the ultimate takeaway is that the bad guys aren’t giving her enough of a chance to assimilate, not that assimilation is bad! 

Eventually, Pocahontas is brought to a ball to prove that she’s “un-savage” enough, shows empathy to a bear during a bear-baiting, and is thrown in jail for… uh… insulting British customs, I guess. John Smith is revealed to be alive, he schemes with John Rolfe to spring Pocahontas out of jail, and after all that she decides to seek an audience with the king who imprisoned her. She tries to explain that there isn’t any gold in Virginia, the king doesn’t believe her, but then John Smith reveals he’s alive and suddenly the king is far more willing to believe her story. At least that’s accurate.

That sounds… incredibly boring.

It is! And it’s a weird romanticization of a really awful, tragic story. The same is true of the first Pocahontas, of course, but at least that had good music! With the combination of a) no conceivable plot, b) padded run time, and c) BLOODY AND TRAGIC SOURCE MATERIAL, you’d think that someone would have thought better of making this cinematic garbage. But nope. Had to ride the Pocahontas wave for as long as they could. Thanks, Disney. We have this movie now, I guess. Delightful.

And if you don’t know why this fluffy little nothing of a movie is such an insult to the very real suffering Pocahontas endured at the hands of colonists and the British government, good news! You can read an indigenous-backed recounting of the written and oral history of what actually happened to her here. Trigger warning: the story is incredibly gruesome and includes kidnapping, rape, pedophilia, the murder of indigenous people, and other various sociopolitical outrages.

So, that’s it. An entire podcast episode dedicated to unpacking a movie I saw too many times at a formative age. I suppose there have been worse podcast subjects. Probably.