#16 - Irene Bedard and Judy Kuhn as Pocahontas - Pocahontas (1995)
Maybe this one will spark some discussion. Pocahontas is a weird one in the Disney animated canon, that admittedly I have not seen for quite a while. I've been doing a (very) slow watchthrough of the entire Disney canon over the last couple years (I told you it was slow) and I suppose this is coming fairly soon, which is good, because I remember very little about it.
Very little, that is, except Pocahontas and John Smith, who I remember well enough to talk about. Irene Bedard does a decent job as Pocahontas' speaking voice. Though I've always found her to be a bit bland as a leading Disney character (I feel like Mel Gibson has more charisma as John Smith and steals her spotlight a bit, at least in my memory), she certainly never irritated me, and plays the part serviceably. A few scenes I always seem to remember her giving a really good performance in are the "If I Never Knew You" scene with John Smith in the tent, and the "NO!" at the end of "Savages" - in both instances she was understated, yet effective.
And that seems to be the main thing about this lower part of the list - the word "understated". That these people are making it onto the list in the first place means that I like understated performances. But in animation, there comes a point where subtlety just doesn't play, and I think Pocahontas might be treading this line a little too finely. Which is especially interesting and jarring considering the soundtrack is one of Disney's two Menken/Schwartz collaborations, which means the songs have about as much subtlety as the train explosion scene from Super 8, if the train explosion had been caused by a mob of Xenomorphs from Alien, riding into town on the backs of Tolkien oliphaunts.
Which brings me to Judy Kuhn as Pocahontas' singing voice. Now, being the Broadway musicals guy that I am, I'm quite familiar with Judy Kuhn's work, and to be honest, I'm usually not a big fan. But her voice is what carries this movie. They were very smart to give her a part in practically all of the major songs - it's such a great marriage of song and singer that I almost have to assume that Alan Menken wrote the songs with specifically Kuhn in mind. She's phenomenal.
So what's holding this back? Mostly Irene Bedard. Though she works, she's never anything spectacular like Judy Kuhn is, and there's at least one example ahead of her in the list where both the speaking voice and the singing voice are on the same kind of top tier that Judy Kuhn is in this role. Honestly, this is a film that I feel would've done much better as a Broadway musical than as a movie (something that Hunchback of Notre Dame, the other Menken/Schwartz collaboration, already accomplished a decade ago overseas, which has yet to be translated back into English). In a musical, you get at least an extra hour to flesh out characters, write more songs, and just tell a deeper story, and truly, I think that's what Pocahontas needed to truly shine, as a story AND as a character. What was there wasn't bad - it was what wasn't there that made Pocahontas not live up to its true potential.