Jim Hill: From the Archives
Page 5 of 6

Pocahontas (from the Soundtrack cover)
(c) Disney

Pocahontas (1995)
Everyone knows that Candy turned in a killer performance as Wilbur, the fun loving albatross in Disney's 1990 animated feature, The Rescuers Down Under. But how many of you know that John was invited to Disney to provide the voice for yet another bird -- a turkey this time -- only to have his goose cooked when Jeffrey Katzenberg got "Go for the Gold" fever.

It's true. Katzenberg's lust for a "Best Picture" nomination ended up costing Candy his second chance to portray a Disney animated character as well as bleeding a lot of the fun out of Pocahontas. You know, there are still people working at Disney Studios who believe that "Pocahontas" would have been a better movie if Beauty and the Beast just hadn't been nominated for "Best Picture" in the 1991 Academy Awards.

Think about it. Pocahontas was happily chugging along the development track at Disney. It was shaping up to be a small but fun film for the studio. Its production team had already decided that the legendary Indian princess should be portrayed as a 12 year-old girl who falls in love with John Smith, a 15 year-old English settler. That seemed like the simplest, most innocent way for the Mouse to handle some fairly sensitive subject material.

Then Beauty and The Beast hits theaters in November 1991 - and hits big. The film gets great reviews and racks up huge numbers at the box office. The critics go on and on about what a wonderful date film "Beauty and The Beast" is, how adults have been won over by this marvelous animated film.

And then, in February 1992, the Academy Award nominations are announced. And there's Beauty and the Beast, the first animated film to ever be nominated for a "Best Picture" Oscar.

Sadly, Beauty and The Beast didn't win. Not for "Best Picture," anyway. (The film did take home three other Oscars that night. "Best Song", "Best Score" as well as a special award in recognition of Disney's development of CAPs, the computer animation production system that the Mouse had used so brilliant during the production of Beauty and the Beast.)

But Jeffrey Katzenberg had seen the promised land. People were now taking the studio's animated films, the movies he personally supervised, seriously. If Beauty and the Beast had come close to winning a "Best Picture" Oscar, Jeffrey was now determined to do whatever he had to see to it that another Disney animated film win that award.

So Jeffrey scouted out his competition. Looking back over the history of the Oscars, Katzenberg learned that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences usually gave its "Best Picture" award to films it felt were big and serious, sweeping romantic epics. "If that's the way they play it, fine by me" Katzenberg thought. "Disney's just going to have to churn out the biggest, most serious sweepingly romantic cartoon the world has ever seen."

Since both Aladdin and The Lion King were too far along in production to get a win-a-Best-Picture-Oscar makeover, Katzenberg pretty much left those films alone. But not poor Pocahontas.

Here was a film whose development was just getting underway. Here was a story that Jeffrey would have plenty of time to shape and mold 'til it was serious enough and important enough that the Academy would *HAVE TO* take notice, guaranteeing Pocahontas a best picture nomination in 1996.

The first thing Katzenberg changed was Pocahontas and John Smith's ages. Now 18 years old, Jeffrey ordered order her animator -- animation master Glen Keane -- to make Pocahontas "the most beautiful creature that had ever walked the earth." John Smith's age was also moved up, too. No longer a gawky adolescent, Smith was a robust, manly adventurer of 25 years of age.