Review of Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World (1998) (V)

Including having this piece of garbage in the house. I thought I'd seen the worst of Disney crap with the Beauty and the Beast sequel, but I was wrong. This is much worse. The dialogue is unbelievable - would anyone in the 17th century have talked about "respecting my culture" the way this thoroughly PC Pocahontas does? The cartooning is dreadful - James I is portrayed as a ninny, who makes the old Bugs Bunny parody of Charles Laughton as Nero look like a Holbein portrait. There's some silly "My Fair Lady" plot tossed in, complete with historically nowhere costuming. But the worst thing is the music. It's smeared on everything, like a layer of cheap paint, and it is all completely pointless. This movie gives rise to the question, fatal for any musical, "What is this music here FOR?" In a good musical, the music and songs are supposed to add layers of meaning that mere spoken dialogue can't do - sort of like reaching for another medium to convey more than you can do with words. But in this, the music is just stuck on there because - well, because this is a Disney film, and that's what Disney films DO. It goes on and on - half the time I think they put in songs because a song will take up 3 or 4 minutes, and will use up more time than a spoken line. The dialogue seemed to be tiny little bridges between one ghastly song after another. And everything was a cliche - the chorus was always shouting, the English were always singing some jiggity-jiggity-jig song and Pocahontas was forever warbling long, flowing ballads. The whole thing is a mess.