Hacker Cinema
Pocahontas
1995 · Film · 81 min
Directed by Mike Gabriel, Eric Goldberg
AdventureAnimationFamilyRomance
Pocahontas, daughter of a Native American tribe chief, falls in love with an English soldier as colonists invade 17th century Virginia.
1 positive5 negative8 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
Yep! My essays in schools had prompts like “Describe the similarities between the Pocahontas story and the first Avatar movies”. The point was not the produced text, but the activity itself. And as a teacher, I believe it’s quite easy to catch cheaters, because producing a stellar text one day and a crappy piece another is an anomaly.
Which is precisely why it's impossible to point at exactly what the problem is.
Yes, all films have messaging, so why did messaging change? Was it not pro-women enough? The Little Mermaid came out in 89 with great success. Not diverse enough? If there is one thing that Disney deserves flak for is for plundering tales from all around the world. Pocahontas and Mulan were also massively successful, long ago.
The most recent "incidents" I recall are the new Little Mermaid being black, the seven little dwarves being of various ethnicities (With a Hispanic Snow White) and the whole deal regarding Star Wars. It gives the feeling that the messaging was deemed not enough. It's not enough to have films like Mulan or El Dorado, or Lilo & Stitch or Aladin, with a plethora of cultures and races, that which is white and male has to changed on top of that. I can't even imagine the reactions if Disney dared turn Mulan black, but The Little Mermaid is Danish, and since that country is predominantly white, it's fair game since that's what US left-wing politics dictate. Not to even mention what China's reaction would have been.
I think it's important to emphasize, we already had diversity, the current state of things is a different matter that, if I might add, looks ridiculous as hell from Europe.
If you mean not disciplined to caricaturize and stigmatize racial stereotypes a la Disney films by diversity and alignment, that won't be coming from anywhere Asia... Especially the "Asian" face makeup prevalent in NA, sometimes derogatorily called "Pocahontas" face. That one is American special.
Marvel movies are the top of the line financially, but they are all the same basic formula, and they're effectively film versions of old comic storylines.
When was the last time you saw actually original (as in, not based on last year's surprisingly successful novel), creative, non-"mainstream" movies at your city's cinema? Interstellar or (to a certain extent, given that the plot was more or less copied from Pocahontas) Avatar, likely.
Anything else is moved off to niche/arthouse cinema or straight to DVD/Netflix.
With games, it's the same. Innovation has been sorely lacking in many genres from racing to shooters - it's all remasters, microtransactions, free to play and advertising bullshit these days or the atrocity that Rockstar made out of GTA 3/VC/SA. Last actually innovative game in the shooter genre probably was Borderlands.
> If we can be shown Pocahontas and The Patriot...
I don't think schools should include either of these, either, beyond "we're having a relaxing movie day as a treat". Certainly no one should base their understanding of American history on them.
Fictional dramas are shown in schools all the time, even if they're not an official part of the curriculum. If we can be shown Pocahontas and The Patriot (a film where among other things Mel Gibson slays 30+ British soldiers with a tomahawk of all things) we can be shown one that portrays American cruelties as well.
It's not like Mulan was focused on being pretty and waiting for a prince either. Or Brave(not pre-2000, just not recent), or even Pocahontas.
I feel if anything the "pretty is everything" comes from toys, rather then the movie plots themselves.
Any analysis is incomplete if all it look at is the protagonist without looking at the mirror image that is the antagonist. Each film is only as good as its villain, so what does a typical Disney villain look like and what gender/attributes do they have?
In Pocahontas the antagonist is the exploiter, the disrupter of natural order, and the destroyer, and male. In Hercules he is the manipulator and manifestation of evil. In Mulan he is represented as the mindless horde of destroyers. In frozen he is the liar, the cheater, the bully. In Aladdin it is the mustache-twirling, eye-rolling, leering, and old man.
There is a small minority of Disney movies that have a female antagonist, but they are all version of the same evil witch stereotype. Old, infertile, predator of children.
So what does this teach children about social behavior and crime? What about who deserve sympathy and who is redeemable? About conflict resolution and handling of blame?
Disney movies aren't the best places if we want to avoid stereotypes, and that include the newer movies like Frozen.
"With Pocahontas (1995), for example, Disney showed that not even cartoon women can “have it all”. The Indian princess must choose between success in the public sphere and a happy romantic life."
If you make a movie about life in a society which does not value women equally, how can you be surprised that the movie does not present them as such.
"Mulan is a bold Chinese warrior, respected and followed by her people…all of whom think she is a man, because she has deceived them by cutting her hair. The point here appears to be that to become a good leader, a woman should look and act like a man."
I mean....what? Is that the lesson you got out of that movie??? It's an extremely shallow interpretation of the message here, one that almost seems bent just to fit a certain narrative.
"But, the protagonist Elsa has dubious leadership skills. As the elder sister, she is responsible for governing, but when she gets nervous she lets her emotions get the better of her. Despite her good intentions, she cannot effectively wield power.
As a result, she freezes her realm and withdraws into a solitary world. In other words, she lacks emotional intelligence."
Once again, you are trying to make the interpretation fit the narration. Maybe she is just portrayed as a normal human being who has flaws, not a perfect-in-every-way robot? Wouldn't a film where the main character never makes any mistakes and has perfect control of their emotions be just.....boring? If anything, I'm really bothered by the fact that in those movies men are shown as having zero emotions whatsoever, as if men should have everything planned out beforehand - what a stupid idea.
> If you take the plot from an episode of Star Trek and modify it such that it fits into the Dr Who storyline, you've created a work that's derivative of both Star Trek and Dr Who. Similarly, if you take code from Solaris and modify it such that it tightly integrates with Linux, you've created a work that's derivative of both Solaris and Linux. Since ZFS can only be distributed under the CDDL and since GPLv2 requires all derived works to be distributed under the GPL, you can't satisfy the license.
That is analogous to writing a new piece of software intended to be similar to an existing piece of software rather than a port of software under license. Examples of the former include the Linux kernel (meant to be similar to UNIX SVR4) and the wine project (meant to be similar to Windows). If that argument is valid:
1. Oracle is in an excellent position to sue every Linux user not using Oracle Linux, because they own rights to UNIX SVR4, which they inherited from Sun.
2. Microsoft is in an excellent position to sue wine users.
3. James Cameron and 20th century Fox would also be in trouble with Disney for Avatar's similarities to Pocahontas.
4. Probably plenty of other bad things.
However, this argument does not apply to ZoL because the code originated in OpenSolaris and is under license and exists as a discrete module, rather than a whole program.
So far, the only thing that you have concretely stated is that you met some attorneys who were unwilling to make a decision on legality. You are not an attorney (unless you have obtained a bar number since I last asked) and I have yet to hear that anyone with a bar number that agrees with you.
If you want to prohibit people from using software you write with things that you consider to be derivatives when the law does not recognize them as such, you need a license that makes that explicit. Such a license could not be called an open source license under clause #9 of the open source definition:
https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
Consequently, the GPL is definitely the wrong license for that.
Yeah, the plots of Avatar and Pocahontas are so identical that you can literally take a synopsis and play Mad Libs substituting the character names and it describes both perfectly.
The ultimate laziness of avatar: The mineral they're after that is so hard to find that is the basis for the movie, what shall we call it? Ahem, unobtainium yeah that's a good name!
I laughed out loud in the movie theater when they revealed that.
> The plot of "Avatar" was depressingly cliche; a standard retelling of the standard action movie plot, done once again.
I liked when Avatar was described as "Pocahontas in Space". It's pretty interesting tooling around on TVTropes.org and seeing exactly how you can break down a movie into well-known and well-worn cliches.
It reminds me a bit of high school literature critique. It used to bother me quite a bit when we'd tease out these meanings from books since I couldn't believe that authors spent their time trying to come up with hidden metaphors on every page. It took a long time to change my perspective to recognize that these books were successful decades after they've been written because of those buried metaphors and tropes. All of the books that were facile and poorly written disappear into history, and whether the authors intended every single sunset to mean something unique, the books are worth studying because they connect in that way and for whatever reason, we connect with those meanings.
Warning for those who get sidetracked easily, TVTropes is a worse wormhole than wikipedia, but it's endlessly interesting to see what's behind successful media: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Avatar
I don't know why people keep comparing this film to Pocahontas; It's really more like FernGully in space.
I too enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I can agree that the plot was simplistic, but I for one did not find the dialog horrible. Like the review points out, it comes off like something mixing elements of Disney movies like "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas," which admittedly are movies I get a little choked up at. For me personally, that gave it a certain innocence and heartfelt quality. Is it predictable?Sure, but that doesn't neccessarily make it bad. I was emotionally engaded as well as visually stimulated, if not intellectually challenged by the film. For better or worse, that made it great for me.