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What strikes you first about this animated film is that the horses don’t talk. They don’t sing or even break out dancing. There are songs, but Bryan Adams sings them, not the wild Mustangs and other hoofed creatures we meet. The horses (except for Spirit, whose thoughts are voiced by Matt Damon) communicate entirely by neighs, whinnies, snorts, and a variety of facial expressions and horsey body language. After twenty minutes or so, I found it refreshing.
No one ever says, “Howdy, Spirit,” or “Spirit, look out!” or “Hey Spirit, how ‘bout those Red Sox?” For this reason, Spirit essentially becomes the Horse with No Name. Neat.
Spirit is born in the free, open spaces of the Old West. He grows to become leader of the herd but makes a mistake — he notices Man in the neighborhood and decides to say hello. After an intense chase scene, Spirit is roped and dragged to an army fort, where a General Custer lookalike, the Colonel, tries to break Spirit. Yeah, right. The Colonel finds himself on his backside in the dust, and Spirit escapes with the help of a young Lakota brave.
Plenty of other adventures await our hero — he enjoys freedom, gets captured, gets free again, captured again, free again. He meets a girl, races a runaway locomotive, falls in love — it’s horse heaven. But, oh no! Can that be the Colonel, back to try again?
Pity the fool.
I think my kids, ages seven and nine, liked the movie. Hard to tell, because they insisted on sitting forty feet from their mother and me. But I know we enjoyed it. The idea of freedom, and the price we pay to keep it, resonates with everyone. And the songs were pretty good, too.
