Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron


I looked it up and it seems like the early 2000s was sort of a shifting time for the animation, due to the post-millennial tensions or whatever. The Disney musical was beginning to lose its grip on feature animation. That company’s most recent features were the unpopular EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE and ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE (not a musical). Meanwhile, other mediums of animation were beginning to have success (CHICKEN RUN, Academy Award nominee JIMMY NEUTRON [!?], SHREK, the Pixar movies, WAKING LIFE, ICE AGE). So it might’ve been too little too late when Dreamworks Animation tried to copy Disney’s ’90s look and feel but with some changes to the formula (PRINCE OF EGYPT, ROAD TO EL DORADO, this).

Maybe they could’ve tried using a style and subject matter that hadn’t really been done in animation, instead they figured it was daring enough just to move a few blocks away from feisty princesses, fairy tales and funny animals. Sure, they drew it in a style blatantly derived from what Disney had developed over the years so that most people probly didn’t notice a difference. But they made two bold choices: the animals would not talk, and it would not be a musical.

mp_spiritThe main character is a horse, and Matt Damon narrates the movie in his point of view, but he doesn’t talk. No, he just smiles, laughs, has big expressive eyes and eyebrows, knows how to shake his head yes or no, or to gesture “come here” or “look out behind you,” or to roll his eyes at somebody he thinks is acting like an idiot. And he seems to understand most of what humans are doing and saying, and understands guns enough to go tackle a human that’s aiming one at another human he likes better. But he doesn’t straight up talk, and doesn’t wear pants, so it’s almost like a real horse!

And like I said, it’s not a musical, so everybody should be happy about that. That’s pretty cool.

Oh, one thing: it has a whole bunch of musical montages set to Bryan Adams songs with double meaning lyrics. For example there’s one called “Get Off My Back” while the horse is first being ridden. But it’s not a musical! They don’t lip synch any of that stuff. Totally tasteful.

Spirit is the leader of his horsepeople, much like Bambi or Lion King before him. But one day he sees some crazy shit he never saw before (a campfire) and starts nosing around some weird little pink critters (horse rustlers) and gets himself captured. He gets taken to a military camp where they try to train him, but he’s a natural rebel so he refuses to be tamed and gets tied to a pole without food by the villain of the piece, an asshole colonel or whatever. The boss guy with the hat.

While undergoing this isolation punishment the soldiers catch another rebellious spirit that they tie to a pole, but it’s not a horse, it’s a Native American individual. Eventually they escape and although it pisses off Spirit that this guy tries to tame him too he starts to feel sorry for him because the other humans in his human tribe make fun of him. Also Spirit falls for a girl horse. You can tell she’s a girl because her eyes are feminine and her mane is like girl hair. No lipstick though. No bow in the mane. Just a feather.

The horses here get painted up. Spirit refuses, probly because of his love for freedom, not because it makes him feel like a girl or a juggalo. Anyway it’s a clever idea because later we can distinguish some of the horse characters (horsachters?) by their markings. Rain received an honorary registration certificate from the American Paint Horse Association (APHA), which has registered more than 670,000 American Paint Horses to date. She is the first animated horse to be registered by this organization. I have no idea what those last two sentences mean, I cut and pasted them from Wikipedia.

Well I guess I shouldn’t lay out the entire plot but we’re pretty much at the climax where the fuckin white man is trying to build train tracks through where the horses live and committing genocide against their Native American allies. Both of these things piss off Spirit and in his struggle to escape them he ends up sabotaging their plans. He becomes a GUERILLA WAR HORSE.

One thing that’s unique, the script is not by an animation guy, it’s a guy named John Fusco who sort of specializes in westerns – YOUNG GUNS I-II, THUNDERHEART, later HIDALGO. Also CROSSROADS with Ralph Macchio.

It’s a pretty good story actually, I like the simplicity of it. I like the subplot about how he’s sort of friends with an eagle, which doesn’t mean they hang out and say funny things to each other, it just means the eagle will fly low and he’ll chase it around. So when he’s allowed himself to be domesticated to get down the girl horse’s pants (metaphor – like I said, they don’t wear pants in this one) and then sees the eagle fly over and can’t chase it you know that he’s thinking “ah shit, I’ve gone soft, I need to be free, I am Spirit, the Stallion of the Cimarron, which is synonymous with being a stallion who represents the spirit of the Cimarron.”

The movie even ends (uh, SPOILER here) with one of my favorite types of resolution, the Nod of Mutual Respect Between Warriors. Two men of opposing forces decide to at least temporarily cease hostilities because they have earned each other’s respect through battle. (In the case of BEYOND THUNDERDOME it’s one man and one woman, in the case of this one it’s one man and one horse.) They don’t exactly become Fight Brothers (like in BEST OF THE BEST 1-2 or ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) but they sort of become Long Distance Fight Admirers. They may or may not meet again, but they definitely won’t forget each other.

The animation deserves recognition on a technical level. It looks very impressive because the camera always swoops around and the characters look completely three-dimensional even though they’re drawings. The DVD menu helpfully explains how this was done through a shot progression: they first animated crude computer models of horses running, created the camera moves, then used that footage for reference to draw over. Smart idea. It seems to be put to use all throughout the movie, but especially in the first scene, which is like a long helicopter shot swooping through and showing all the land and characters. There’s obviously alot of computering going on but they’re mostly successful making it look like a three-dimensional water color painting. The best of old and new techniques. A cyborg.

spirit-aladdinBut man, it’s hard to get past the ridiculousness of horses making faces. I know I complained about the war horse in WAR HORSE seeming soul-less and horse-like, but I just meant that horses might not be the best protagonists, not that they needed to have eyebrows. In this case maybe the cartoon creators should’ve gone more soul-less, more like a real horse, less like a horse version of Aladdin.

I guess in a way the horses having human expressions and gestures is closer to reality than the traditional talking cartoon animal, but to me anyway it only emphasizes how real they’re not. If the horses just talked to each other I wouldn’t take it literally, I would assume it was symbolic of some other type of horse communication and buy into the fantasy. I’d understand that the people don’t hear it. Kind of like how Daniel Craig speaking English with reading glasses is actually him speaking in Swedish. But when they don’t talk and we’re pretending they’re real animals, and then they fuckin smile at each other, the shit creeps me out. I’d rather they just talk than drag me into this Unhorsely Valley. And the Bryan Adams songs are doing nothing to soothe me.

Then again, the narration is problematic too. They try to treat this as a real world of horses, it’s not like they have some secret society we don’t know about. They just have a herd with a leader, they don’t have their own human-style civilization like a RESCUERS or a HAPPY FEET or a SECRETS OF NIMH. So when Damon as Spirit narrates “I lay beside her that night, hoping – praying – that somehow she would be okay” I think wait a minute, this horse knows about praying? Is he praying to a horse God, or a human one? Knowing these cartoon horses he probly even puts his two front hooves together when he does it.

I mean if you think about it it really would be good to know what religion this horse practices, because the white man came to this land and forced Christianity on the Natives, it would be interesting to know if the horses picked it up or not.

There are alot of those type of questions. When Spirit says “They say the history of the West was written from the saddle of a horse,” or “They say the mustang is the spirit of the West,” I end up shouting at the screen “Who is they? How do you know what they say? Did you actually hear them say it? Did you read it in a book?” These animators try so hard to make it more real than your usual cartoon, but it still brings up weird CARS type logic questions.

But I guess I can’t complain, I sort of got a kick out of how wrong it was. If smiling horses make you smile, check it out. Maybe turn the sound off.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2012 at 1:10 am and is filed under Cartoons and Shit, Family, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

19 Responses to “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron”

  1. I never saw this one. I’m a huge animation fan, as y’all might know, but I seriously did not care for this one.
    THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE is awesome, though. Who would have known that Disney could do a Chuck Jones-esque animated absurdity like this AND make it work!

  2. Some youtube genius thinks this cartoon horse movie is the ideal visual expression of the teevee show “Party of Five” theme song, “Closer to Free.”


    The implications are staggering.

  3. boy, talk about an unexpected review, this is your first non-CGI animated movie review in how long Vern?

    anyway Atlantis: The Lost Empire was Disney’s attempt at anime (just like they ripped off Kimba The White Lion for The Lion King, Disney ripped off Nadia: Secret of Blue Water for Atlantis)

    I remember actually being really excited for it for like a few months leading up to it and then when I finally saw it even at 11 years old I thought it was lame, plus there was barely anyone in the theater and it was opening weekend

    I do remember liking The Emperor’s New Groove though, but I don’t remember a whole lot about it

  4. I wouldn’t call ATLANTIS an attempt at anime. It’s way too much of a typical western adventure story for this and visually it’s not really anime either. I think it was more a try to proof to the teen audiences, that they can be cool and produce an animated movie with a high bodycount, but without any songs or cuteness. (It still had some typical comic relief characters in it.) I pretty much liked it, but haven’t seen it since it came out, so I don’t know if it holds up.

  5. I kind of miss the traditional animation. I never saw this one, but I feel as if American animation really missed out on the possibilities 2D animation offers. I too really enjoyed The Emperor’s New Groove, which was a nice break from Disney’s song and dance formula. It really showed that they were trying to branch out a little. Too bad the 2D arm of their animation department folded not long after that movie came out.

  6. Of COURSE the horses need eyebrows Vern. How else are they going to do the Dreamworks Face™ of “raise one eybrow and smirk”?
    Sprit’s even doing it on the poster!

  7. I never saw this movie or even remembered that it existed, but in my unsubstantiated opinion I bet it would have been a lot better if instead of Bryan Adams, they got Manowar to do the songs.


    The rocking kicks in at the 1:30 mark, but if nothing else stick around for the amazing war whoop at 2:30.

  8. This movie didn’t look interesting to me when it came out because the horse’s name is “Spirit”, which made me think of My Little Pony. But reading this review, I think I get it now. You can’t give the horsies English-Indian names like “Running Dog” or “Soggy Beaver”, because they’re already animals. So you have to name them one word naturesque things like “Spirit” and “Rain”. And to find out a movie was reaching out to the ALADDIN-is-cool demographic means I should probably watch this.
    I do think animals having their own alternate world is generally the way to go though, especially if you push it to where their world becomes the only world, like in Disney’s animated ROBIN HOOD. Then you don’t have to have the mopey kid who’s mad/sad/glad about his dad all the time.


    Oh COME ON. Someone has to make a talking animal cartoon movie where they are also all juggalos. “The quest to find out how magnets work,” with a horse juggalo, a dog juggalo, and a cat juggalo, each with a sassy character trait. Through a terrain of strip malls they feverishly look for faygo soda. Then they throw feces, rocks and pee filled bottles at Tia Tequila.

    A beautiful disney style homage to the juggalo aesthetic.

  10. Baraka, you just reminded me that ICP did make a direct to DVD western, called Big Money Rustlas. I’ve never actually seen this film, but I’m certain it would make one hell of a review.

  11. A period juggalo piece?!


    Wow. Fact is indeed much stranger than fiction.

  12. CJ – “visually it’s not really anime either.”

    well duh, that’s because Disney has to “Disneyfy” everything to make it safe for mass consumption and thus all their movies looked the same back then

    I mentioned that Gerald Scarfe worked on Hercules but I never would have guessed in a million years unless I had been told that because they “Disneyfied” his art style and thus it only very vaguely resembles it

    so just because it doesn’t “look” like anime doesn’t mean Disney didn’t have it on their minds when they made it

    and I’m not saying they were trying to directly compete with anime, but I do think they were aiming for a more male and slightly older audience and anime is where they looked for inspiration, thus why it’s so similar in plot to Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water

  13. also, this is the most obscure movie Vern has reviewed in a while

    the title sounded vaguely familiar, but I don’t think I had really heard of it back in 2002 (by that time I was too busy with video games and had left every non-Pixar kid’s movie behind) and I damn sure forgot about it until now

  14. The weird thing is that both Hercules and Atlantis were often critizised for lacking the typical visual Disney style.
    I still don’t buy the theory that Atlantis was supposed to be “Disney’s Anime”. They definitely tried something different, but in the end it was more a typical Jules Vern-esque adventure story, than anything vaguely resembling anime.
    I know that people accused MULAN of being Disney’s try to capture the Anime audience, but that’s bullshit too, IMO. (Especially because they started working on it right after BEAUTY & THE BEAST, when Anime had not really that much mass appeal, to frighten Disney.)

  15. I remember this one. Even though the horses were creepily expressive I appreciated that they never broke into song or told lame jokes in a Robin Williams voice. Possibly the most dialed down release from Dreamworks animation; ever.

  16. “by that time I was too busy with video games and had left every non-Pixar kid’s movie behind”

    actually thinking about it that is incorrect, I did see the second Shrek movie in 2004, but I can’t really remember why

    thinking about this though has brought back some funny memories, I remember how in just the span of a year (from 2001 to 2002) I had gone from basically still considering myself a kid to then considering myself a more mature “teenager” (even though I was still only 12), I left a bunch of childhood things behind in 2002, that was the year I stopped watching Nickelodeon for example, also the last toys I had bought had also been in 2001

    by 2002 I was officially a full time “gamer”

  17. Crossroads! My friend & I were just talking about this movie today. Sure, you have to believe that Ralph Machio, aka “Don’t you die on me, Johnny” from The Outsiders, is a badass guitar player, but I still love the movie & it has one of my favorite battles over someone’s soul. Even though it’s debatable that he (SPOILER) sold out to win his soul. I would love to see your review of this one, Vern.

  18. Well, I guess I’m in the minority here, but Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron was one of my favorites! I had a lot of favorites, so that slightly dilutes that praise, but still…

    I also had the soundtrack and listened to it constantly…

    It’s funny to see all the comparisons between Spirit and The Emperor’s New Groove. I personally didn’t like The Emperor’s New Groove. To me, it felt campy and goofy…in a bad way. I didn’t feel any connection with characters. Heck, I didn’t even really care what happened to them. I didn’t feel the same way about Spirit. As a seven year old, I was very personally invested in the plot.

    I see your point with the horses’ exaggerated facial expressions, but I think it worked. Without them, our main protagonists wouldn’t be very expressive, and since they also can’t talk, I can see that getting very boring, very fast. One of my favorite parts about the movie was Spirit’s attitude. They really couldn’t have expressed that as well without the facial expressions.

    Anyway, I loved this movie. And I agree with you on the ending. I loved their mutual nod of respect at the end.

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