Little Hiawatha Little Hiawatha Little Hiawatha (also called Hiawatha) is a 1937 animated cartoon produced by Walt Disney, inspired by the poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The animated short appears on the Gold Collection DVD of "" and the 2012 Blu-ray of Walt Disney's "Pocahontas". It is the last Silly Symphony to be released by United Artists. Over opening narration, a Native American boy named Little Hiawatha is seen paddling his canoe down a river — at one point backwards — on his way to hunt game. Upon reaching land, he steps out and immediately falls down a
The Song of Hiawatha absurd, and savage as the groundwork is, Mr. LONGFELLOW has woven over it a profuse wreath of his own poetic elegancies." But, he concludes, "Hiawatha" "will never add to Mr. LONGFELLOW's reputation as a poet." Thomas Conrad Porter, a professor at Franklin and Marshall College, believed that Longfellow had been inspired by more than the metrics of the "Kalevala." He claimed "The Song of Hiawatha" was "Plagiarism" in the "Washington National Intelligencer" of November 27, 1855. Longfellow wrote to his friend Charles Sumner a few days later: "As to having 'taken many of the most striking incidents of the Finnish