One of Schwartz and Co.'s/UAV Entertainment's worst for sure, and even for an independent production the story of Pocahontas has never been more dully and cheaply told in animation. See everything you want about Disney's film, but while it has its flaws and a long way from Disney's best, at least that's well-made, had incredible music and had some emotion. There are some nice moments in the incidental score, other than that Young Pocahontas has nothing to recommend it.
The animation is really not great, in fact apart from a few nice colours it's quite bad and inept in the worst parts. The few nice colours are not enough to make up for numerous flat ones, backgrounds are limited in number and even more limited in detail, being sparse, simplistic and never authentic and the drawing and character designs are constantly rough with all the characters looking and moving quite stiff. The songs are just awful too, not only are they not memorable in any way but they were not necessary and are a pain to listen to. Especially bad was the Medicine Man's song, which has easily the most cringe-worthy lyric writing of any song from a Schwartz and Co./UAV Entertainment animated production.
As for the dialogue, it constantly sounded very dumbed-down and stilted, and in the very worst of corny ways. Powhatan's last line to the Medicine Man is a real howler, and the Medicine Man is just a badly written villain character from the start. The story has very little to it, despite Young Pocahontas being one of Schwartz and Co.'s/UAV Entertainment's shortest animations, and what there is of it is dull (Pocahontas and John Smith's friendship, which is not shown enough) and muddled (everything involving the Medicine Man). The all-over-the-place pacing doesn't help, the first fifteen minutes drag badly and then when there is a little more story it rushes through it so that the story at the end felt too conveniently anti-climactic and over too soon.
Of the characters, John Smith is the least bad, he was pretty sympathetic and was the best voiced character but he was also one of the most stiffly designed ones and his treatment of his goofy first mate whose only purpose was seemingly to cause trouble diminished his likability a little. Pocahontas and the rest of the Indians are written blandly, while the animal characters while cute served little point until the climax and the Medicine Man is very poorly written and any conflict he was meant to bring actually brought a lot of unintentional goofiness. The over-the-top voice acting for the character is a large part of why, and the unintentionally comical dialogue an even larger part. The rest of the voice work is bland.
All in all, very poorly done and horrendously bad often at its worst. 2/10 Bethany Cox