While Pocahontas is not on my favourites list, I still remember it to be vaguely entertaining. Also, its theme song, “Colors of the Wind” is a lovely song, melodically speaking. However, at times it makes little sense, both in terms of the lyrics and the part from the movie where it’s sung. Tim and I had a number of spirited discussions about it, and I thought I’d note down the main points we came up with. Below is the clip, and the lyrics can be found here.
Title
Firstly, what’s with the title? Wind doesn’t have colour (even though the wind in the clip IS coloured… doesn’t that make it smoke?). You can’t just slap on a description in front of a thing and have it make sense. It’ll kinda like having a title such as “scent of music” or “sourness of sand”. Does Pocahontas have synesthesia? I’d be happy if the title was just a a metaphor, but what’s it a metaphor of? Towards the end of the song, she talks about the “voices of the mountains” and that’s at least understandable as a metaphor for how wind around mountains may sound melodic to human ears or something. But colours of the wind? It’s incredibly odd that her song would be able the very thing that doesn’t have colour when she could’ve talked about any other physical object around them that do.
“You don’t know”
But still I cannot see
If the savage one is me
Now can there be so much that you don’t know?
You don’t know …
How patronising and INCREDIBLY offensive would it be if it was John Smith saying that to her instead? Imagine if, rather than being set in a lush forest landscape, they were in the middle of a British town and he was showing her stuff around the place while saying lines like that? Maybe replace the words “savage one” with, I dunno, “dumb white man”. I don’t think many people would be happy about that, even though in this context, having Pocahontas saying that to him is seen as being okay. Interesting double standard.
However, I can’t remember what happens before this song, so maybe Smith had previous alluded to being way smarter than Pocahontas or something, and now she’s laying the smack down on him.
Rocks Don’t Have Life
You think you own whatever land you land on
The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim
But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name
I’m not much into the whole property ownership thing myself. Especially with intellectual property, monopolising information is just WTF to me. I would agree to some extent that owning living things is problematic (especially sentient things); the fact that people are allowed to patent (and hence monopolise the use of) genetic material and microbiological process is just such bad idea for society as a whole. :(
However, while trees and creatures have life, rocks don’t. I don’t know what’s the point of saying that rocks have a life and spirit. And yes, they all have names, but I’m pretty sure the names were given by human beings to these things, regardless of what race of humans we’re talking about. It’s not like the nasty Brits went around pillaging this and that by purposefully not giving those things a name.
Watch Out For Bears!
Around the 0:58 mark on the video, Pocahontas and Smith sees a female bear and follows her to her den full of bear cubs. There, Pocahontas picks up a cuddly lil’ bear and hands it to Smith while the female bear shyly looks on.
In real life, probably even before Pocahontas and Smith reached the mouth of the cave, the mother bear would’ve FUCKING KILLED THEM for trying to go near her cubs. For someone who seems so familiar with nature, you’d think Pocahontas would know how protective mother bears get of her babies. Or maybe the bears in Disney-verse are just so used to human contact that people can just pick up their cubs. Because THAT’S NATURAL. Thanks, Disney. At least you made bears a little bit more realistic in Brother Bear.
Why Did the Grinning Bobcat Cross the Road Grin?
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?
Pocahontas is implying that possibly the answer is that the bobcat are just happy fellas or something and that the narrow-minded Brits never got it into their arrogant heads to query bobcats of the reasons behind their continuous joy. Even just ignoring the fact that bobcats obviously can’t answer, the more sobering question is, why does she imply that the bobcat WANTS to be grinning? It’s kinda like asking why the Joker is always smiling. Maybe bobcats are actually miserable animals who suffer the additional insult to injury by looking like they’re happy all the time. Or maybe the insult is assuming there’s a point in anthropomorphising them, rather than treating them as animals in their own right without needing to twisted them to fit a list of human traits. Did you ever think of that, Pocahontas?
Eh the rest of the song doesn’t warrant much more critique. It’s a nice point she makes that creatures such as herons and otters are valuable, though I don’t need to call them my friends and family to know they’re worth protecting. I think she might be exaggerating Smith’s narrow-mindedness (I certainly don’t remember him being the racist that she paints him to be in the song), but still, yay for advocating diversity. :) As I said, I like the song, it’s nice to listen to. Still, kinda silly in some parts. :P
Recent Comments