This article explores how popular films like Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book (2016) portray nature as a captivating, emotional spectacle while masking deeper colonial ideologies. Drawing on postcolonial and ecocritical theories, it reveals how these movies romanticize indigenous characters and natural landscapes, erasing histories of colonization, dispossession, and environmental violence. The piece critiques the aestheticization of nature as a “greenwashed” colonial playground, where animals and forests embody imperial hierarchies and indigenous agency is sidelined. Ultimately, the article calls for a more critical, decolonial approach to ecological storytelling, one that recognizes nature as a living archive of histories and struggles, rather than a sanitized backdrop, urging audiences to rethink childhood favorites and engage with environmental narratives that honor justice and sovereignty.
Let’s face it: we’ve all cried during Pocahontas. We’ve all belted out “Colors of the Wind” at some point, maybe even felt that magical breeze she rides through sacred forests, chatting with wise old Grandmother Willow and schooling colonizers on the soul of a tree. And remember Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book remake? That jaw-dropping CGI jungle? Pure cinematic magic:- lush, wild, and alive.
In both films, nature isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a full-on, emotional experience. It dazzles, it moves you, and yeah, it kind of casts a spell.
But what if I tell you that beneath those singing raccoons and shape-shifting vines lies an ideological jungle of its own, one that smells less like roses and more like colonialism?
In this article, we swing between vines of postcolonial and eco-critical theory to explore how two iconic films—Pocahontas (1995) and The Jungle Book (2016) turn nature into an aesthetic experience while subtly asking us to overlook the colonial wounds hidden beneath all that lush beauty.
Green is Not Always Clean: The Problem with Pretty Landscapes
Peter Barry, in his foundational text Beginning Theory, cuts through the postmodern haze with a simple truth: nature exists. It’s not a metaphor or a symbol waiting to be deconstructed—it’s real, material, and being destroyed. That’s the heart of eco criticism: to take nature seriously as both subject and substance. But the way nature is portrayed in popular media is rarely that straightforward.
Films like Pocahontas and The Jungle Book present nature not just as background but as spectacle—a pristine, sacred, or exotic space ripe for exploration. But here’s the twist: these representations often serve colonial nostalgia. The lush forests? They aren’t neutral. They’re reimagined frontiers: territories to be moralised, tamed, or possessed.
Enter the real villain: not the power-hungry colonizer or the snarling Shere Khan, but the narrative itself—that subtle scripting of land as resource, animals as loyal subjects, and indigenous characters as mystical intermediaries.
Pocahontas: When Nature Sings but History Cries
Disney’s Pocahontas has been praised for its ecological messaging. Who can forget that moment when Pocahontas swirls leaves around John Smith and delivers the poetic line, “You think you own whatever land you land on…”? It’s beautiful, poignant, and deeply problematic.
According to postcolonial scholar Sylvia Wynter, such portrayals dangerously romanticize indigenous characters, reducing them to what Raymond Williams once called the “Ecological Noble Savage.” These are characters with deep spiritual wisdom but no political agency, no land rights, and no say in the brutal realities of settler colonialism.
Pocahontas, instead of resisting colonization, is made a bridge, offering her love (and, by extension, her land) to the white man. The actual history of violence, land dispossession, and indigenous resistance is erased, replaced with a Disney-filtered tale of reconciliation through romance.
So what’s being greenwashed here? Not just the landscape, but colonial guilt.
The Jungle Book: Untangling Colonial Dreams in the Wilderness
Rudyard Kipling’s original The Jungle Book (1894) is steeped in imperial themes from the very start. Mowgli—the “man-cub” raised by wolves—is a textbook example of what Boisseron and Mitchell describe as the colonial hybrid: native in form, British in reason. He speaks to animals, leads with rationality, and ultimately restores order, mirroring the civilizing mission of the Empire.
In Jon Favreau’s 2016 remake, the jungle bursts with thrilling wildlife and adventure. But take a closer look. The animals fall into clear roles: Bagheera is the voice of wisdom, Baloo brings the laughs, and Shere Khan rules with fear. Then there’s Mowgli, the human boy: smarter, more resourceful, and marked for leadership. It’s a slick, IMAX-coated version of Darwinian colonialism.
Even more revealing is what’s absent: any acknowledgment of India’s socio-political history, of actual human communities living within or around such landscapes. The jungle is exoticized, emptied of indigenous presence, and refilled with animal characters that allegorize colonial structures.
Nature as a Colonial Playground: Why the Trees Talk, But the People Don’t
As Rob Nixon explains through his concept of slow violence, environmental harm often plays out in invisible, delayed, and disproportionately unequal ways, especially in postcolonial contexts. The violence isn’t in dramatic explosions; it’s in dispossession, resource extraction, and climate displacement. But when nature is aestheticised, turned into a canvas for moral lessons or spiritual purity, this slow violence becomes harder to see.
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin push this further in Postcolonial Ecocriticism: they argue that environmental narratives have historically erased indigenous claims by depicting nature as an unpeopled wilderness. That’s exactly what happens in these films. Forests become enchanted kingdoms or animal nations, rather than colonized spaces entangled with history, ownership, and survival.
Even animals in these narratives aren’t spared from colonial logic. Anthropomorphized creatures like Baloo and Bagheera reflect human social orders and often mirror class and racial hierarchies. Baloo’s goofy charm, for instance, might echo the trope of the servile native, while Bagheera’s British-accented nobility suggests colonial elite mentorship.
So What Do We Do With Our Childhood Favorites?
The goal isn’t to cancel Pocahontas or The Jungle Book. It’s to watch differently.
These films, beloved as they are, participate in a long history of what Jason W. Moore calls “cheap nature”—rendering the land and its inhabitants exploitable for aesthetic or economic gain. Whether it’s Pocahontas’ humming forests or Mowgli’s jungle of trials, what’s being exploited isn’t just a resource—it’s memory, agency, and truth.
By bringing together ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, we can begin to ask better questions:
- What underlying beliefs and values shape the way we portray nature?
- Whose voices are missing from these green narratives?
- How do environmental stories perpetuate or resist structures of empire?
Rewriting the Script: Toward Decolonial Ecologies
Imagine a different kind of story, where land isn’t just beautiful, but sovereign. Where indigenous characters aren’t peace-loving mediators but political agents. Where animals don’t mimic colonial hierarchies but embody relational, nonhuman ethics. Where the jungle isn’t a fantasy but a living, breathing archive of histories, resistances, and futures.
This isn’t just academic wishful thinking—it’s a call for critical media literacy. For watching with eyes wide open. For recognizing that even the greenest films can be tinted by imperial blueprints.
As viewers, we hold the power to shift the gaze—from spectacle to substance, from colonial nostalgia to ecological justice. Because nature, as Barry reminds us, is not an illusion. It exists. And how we see it, tell it, and imagine it—matters.
In the end, perhaps Grandmother Willow was right:
Sometimes the right path is not the easiest one. But it is the most necessary.
Let’s take that path. Let’s rethink the stories we’ve grown up with. Let’s decolonize the jungle.