When Pocahontas was released on June 23, 1995, the criticism it received for taking historical liberties with Pocahontas’s age and relationship with Smith largely overshadowed the fact that Disney had, for the first time, based an entire picture around an adult female, let alone a woman of color. It was also the first time the studio had produced a film about a real person. The movie might have fudged some facts to allow for a compelling romantic story, but it had a progressive attitude when it came to interpreting history, depicting the English settlers as plunderers searching for non-existent gold who were intent upon murdering the “savages” they encountered in the process.

The film also seemed to embrace an environmentalist message, with Pocahontas showing Smith the absurdity of relentlessly taking things from the Earth instead of seeing its potential. It was a radical story about female agency and empathy disguised as a rather sappy romance, and amid the controversy that arose at the time thanks to the subject matter, many of the film’s best qualities have been forgotten. But 20 years later, its impact can be seen in the new wave of animated Disney films like Brave and Frozen, while Pocahontas remains a well-intentioned entry in the Disney canon.

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Prior to the The Little Mermaid’s release in 1989, the ‘70s and ‘80s were lean times for Disney. The two decades before had seen some of the studio’s most iconic pictures, but films like The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) and The Fox and the Hound (1981) were forgettable, while 1985’s The Black Cauldron was a box-office bomb. From 1961 through 1988, Walt Disney Studios largely focused on stories about talking animals, from The Rescuers (1977) to The Great Mouse Detective (1986), as well as Robin Hood (1973), which reinvented the archetypal English characters as anthropomorphized foxes and bears. In 1984, Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, launched a campaign called “SaveDisney” in which he argued that the studio was losing its magic. After the catastrophic release of The Black Cauldron, Roy Disney was put in charge of Disney’s animation department in 1985, and he helped spearhead the company’s creative and financial renaissance of the 1990s.

The Little Mermaid, the 1989 story of a princess named Ariel who falls in love with a human and decides to trade her voice for the ability to live on land, was a film very much in the old Disney mold—a romantic fairytale with child-friendly humor and compelling supporting characters. 1991’s Beauty and the Beast trod similar ground, while 1994’s The Lion King was an animal story given a more epic scope, with the Africa savanna framed as a kingdom and the cub Simba depicted as a young Prince Hamlet whose father had been murdered by his uncle.

Pocahontas was something different entirely. The success of Beauty and the Beast spurred studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to push for another romance, and directors Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg wanted to pursue a story that had its origins in early American history, while also incorporating the Romeo and Juliet-esque elements of two people from very different backgrounds falling in love. But unlike the naive and uncertain Ariel and Belle, Pocahontas would be far more confident—“a woman instead of a teenager,” as supervising animator Glen Keane put it. As the producer Jim Pentacost says in Disney’s 1995 documentary about the making of the feature, “Pocahontas is the strongest heroine we’ve ever had in a Disney film.”