10 More Movies Based On True Stories (That Were Total Lies)

The title character of the animated Disney film was a Powhatan woman who found herself caught up in tensions between Native Americans and English colonists. According to legend, she convinced her father to spare the life of Englishman John Smith by throwing herself across his body as her father went to strike him.

The film became a smash hit for Disney after its 1995 release and won Oscars for its score and for the song Colors of the Wind. It portrays Pocahontas and Smith falling deeply in love and tensions between the Natives and the English being resolved peacefully. And though she could go with her love to his home country, Pocahontas chooses to remain with her father.

In reality, Pocahontas was only 10 years old when she met Smith, who was 17 years older than her, and thankfully there is no indication of any romantic between the two. She would convert to Christianity, marry a man named John Rolfe and have a son before actually moving to England. Also, diseases that the colonists brought to the new world, which the Natives' immune systems were not prepared for, wiped out much of the population before a peaceful resolution was reached.