One day late last year, I got to thinking about my favorite American animated movie of the 21st century, SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON, and realized I hadn’t seen it since it had come out in 2002, twenty years earlier. Thinking about trying to find a copy of it, I paid a casual visit to Barnes & Noble in Union Square later that week and thought to browse in the DVD section and there it was on the first sale rack I saw–with a discount sticker! I paid less than $10 for it and instead of placing it on the already large pile of unwatched discs at home, I watched it immediately and afterwards looked up my rave review of it on IMDB, first posted after a press screening in May 2002, in which I called it, “The first great western of the 21st Century.” In the review, I lauded the filmmakers’ choice to make it a real western, with brilliantly rendered recognizable backdrops, and to not allow the horse characters to talk (with the no-doubt inevitable celebrity voices), focusing instead on the life of a nonverbal mustang in the 1860s west and its turbulent encounters with Indians and the U.S. cavalry, all while trying to get back to his own herd and home valley, picking up a mate along the way.
It’s still very good and I love the 2-D look of most of it. My only criticisms at the time were of the narration by Matt Damon, speaking for the horse, and the frequent songs by Bryan Adams spelling out the action for the kid audience. The narration was spare enough to be excused this time, but I’m still bothered by having so many songs on the soundtrack, nine of them, including four in the first 25 minutes. They’re all kind of obvious, too, as when different riders try to break Spirit in the fort corral by “bucking” him and Adams sings, “Get off of my back.”
However, there is one good song heard nearly an hour into the film, “The Bugle Sounds,” after Spirit’s been recaptured by the cavalry and put onto a train with captured Indian ponies to be used for labor at a railroad camp. It’s a sad, mournful song and is done in a dramatically appropriate style and comes after a nice long stretch without any songs.
I don’t recall how well the film was received at the time. If there has been another American animated feature like it since then, I haven’t seen it. For the record, this is what Box Office Mojo says:
“Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron was released in theaters on May 24, 2002, and earned $122 million on an $80 million budget. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but lost to Spirited Away.”
That would indicate a mild flop since a film has to take in two-and-a-half times its cost just to break even. I was certainly glad Hayao Miyazaki got the Best Animated Feature that year, but it would have pleased me equally if SPIRIT had won. (SPIRIT/SPIRITED–similar titles!)
In any event, here’s the full text of my detailed review of the film for IMDB, posted on May 18, 2002:
The First Great Western of the 21st Century!
SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON, the new animated feature from Dreamworks, is an honest-to-God western. Some of you may be forgiven for thinking it was just a horse movie, a distinct and definable genre in its own right (e.g. BLACK BEAUTY, MY FRIEND FLICKA), but I assure you this is a real, bonafide western, complete with cavalry, Indians, Monument Valley and the building of the transcontinental railroad. It’s a familiar saga (to western fans) but told here from the point-of-view of a wild horse. It just may be the only western that children in today’s audience will get to see on the big screen. (And it’s perfectly suitable for even the smallest children.)
The movie has three selling points for people who are appalled at how childish and inane animated features in the U.S. have been over the last decade or so:
1) It’s got a serious story.
2) The horses don’t talk.
3) The horses don’t sing.
The latter two functions are served by Spirit’s first-person narration, voiced by Matt Damon and told in the past tense as a reminiscence, and several songs on the soundtrack written and performed by Bryan Adams. Neither of these elements were particularly necessary and the movie would have been better without them, although they aren’t fatal. Hans Zimmer’s excellent music score does a far more effective job in conveying, in dramatic and emotional terms, what the songs belabor. But, thankfully, aside from Damon, there are no other celebrity voices, unless you count the excellent character actor James Cromwell, voice of the cavalry officer who plays a significant role in the action.
The other big selling point is the artwork. The background art and western landscapes are stunning and offer a mix of painted scenes and computer-created scenery, although everything seems computer enhanced in one way or another. Most importantly, the film gives us a chance to savor the backgrounds. The characters don’t zip around in constant frenetic motion the way they do in Disney movies. Although there are several chase scenes, the characters are just as likely to pause and connect with each other in movements reflecting naturalistic behavior. There are moments of gentleness, tenderness, curiosity, and discovery, so we get to see the space the characters are in and get to connect with it ourselves. There’s a real palpable sense of environment and geography, of time and place, something rarely found in American animated features.
The character design is also well-done. The human characters all have solid, expressive, recognizable faces, strongly differentiated from each other. The horses are well designed also, looking like horses, but anthropomorphized enough to give them recognizable emotional responses. No character, human or animal, is exaggerated for cartoon effect.
I normally have problems with digital animation and computer-created imagery and SPIRIT is, for the most part, computer created, although it replicates the look of traditional 2-D animation. Still, if this is the wave of the future, then SPIRIT shows us how it should be done. This is digital animation at the best I’ve ever seen it (including the Japanese anime features I’ve seen in the last few years). And combined with a good story and clean concept that doesn’t patronize its audience, it’s created what I think is the finest American animated feature since BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1991). If there is any significant flaw in SPIRIT, aside from the songs, it’s that the story falls short of greatness, undercut by the lack of a sufficiently emotional payoff. Still, it’s a better story than any I’ve seen in an American animated production since at least THE LION KING. Some viewers may quibble about the politically correct aspects of the story (cavalry=bad, Indians=good), but there is a moment near the end that balances things out in an intelligent, dramatic way.
SPIRIT may suffer at the boxoffice because it doesn’t have the all-important lowest-common-denominator touches that have so cheapened the animated genre but attracted audiences looking for easy laughs (e.g. celebrity voices doing hyperactive genies, show-tune-singing meerkats and jive-talking jackasses). But it should give a measure of hope to that small, passionate segment of the audience that cares about animation as a medium capable in its own right of great storytelling and cinematic artistry.
ADDENDUM: For the record, the film was written by John Fusco (YOUNG GUNS I and II) and directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook. In looking up Fusco’s other writing credits, I see that there were four TV sequels to SPIRIT, made in 2017-2022. I have no idea what those look like. Here’s a poster for one. You make the call.
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