For the spiritual ancestor, a male character named Old Man River was originally envisioned, and Gregory Peck was cast in the role. Peck later realized that the character ought to be a maternal figure and reluctantly turned down the role. Conceived as a tree of life whose seasonal changes would frame the story, Grandmother Willow grew out of a concept sketch of a sawed-off tree with a branch pointing to its rings drawn by Joe Grant, which would serve as a narrator that would "remember back to Pocahontas 300 years earlier". Joe Grant would continue to protest to have the tree be more a character within the story, and her character flowered into the idea of a grandmotherly spiritual adviser to Pocahontas. Because of Katzenberg's opposition to having Grandmother Willow in the story, Joe Grant assisted fellow veteran story artist Burny Mattinson with coming up tree puns such as "My bark is worse than my bite", "The roots of all problems", and "They're barking up the wrong tree." Mattinson reluctantly added them to his pitch for the next morning, and during the story meeting, he exclaimed, "Everybody loved it! All of a sudden: 'Oh, I want her in!' 'Let's build her part bigger!'"