The real hero of Disney's new animated picture, Pocahontas, escapes even the most attentive young children. It is neither the free-spirited Indian girl nor the heroically progressive John Smith. Arguably, it is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century philosopher who gave depth to the spunk and spontaneity of the early American spirit. To young people in his time, Emerson's doctrine captured the aestiietic promise of the New World much as this splendidly animated film does. Legend depicted rivers that seemed to roar more thunderously, winds that twirled more fiercely, a place that drowned the certainty of the Old World in a vast, untamed wilderness.