But looks are one thing, how's the rest of the movie?
Spirit is about the misadventures of a horse, who gets dragged from one rough situation to the next. He gets taken away from his homelands and disciplined into being a war horse. He then meets a Native Lakota named "Little Creek", who also tries to tame him, with help from his own horse, a mare named Rain. After an invasion on the Lakota tribe, Spirit is then hauled off to a work camp to haul a train up a mountain. Until he finally meets up with Little Creek once more for a climactic ride away from the American Calvary.
Normally in movies like this, we would typically be privy to the main character's thoughts via anthropomorphism or narrated monologue. Spirit does use a narrator, but he never stays for very long, and is mostly there to help children understand the more complicated emotional aspects of the story. The narrator mostly takes a back seat to the body language and facial expressions of the horses. I think this was a smart idea and the perfect middle ground. This way, children won't be too confused by all that complicated emotional stuff, and the adults won't be annoyed by the constant interruption of an unnecessary narrator. While some people may find the narrator annoying, I personally never felt like he gave everything away, and that he was silent when the moment needed him to be. It's kinda like The Muppet Christmas Carol, where the narrators are silent when the moment needs them to be.
Even without the dialogue, Spirit still has a strong character. The will to never be broken, which earns him the name Spirit in the end, and his pension for mischief make him a fun character. One minute he's feigning death to kick a train down a hill, and the next he's playfully leaping into a river splashing around with Little Creek. The movie also doesn't shy away from more painful emotions, giving Spirit a somber moment where he thinks that he's lost everything. He pulls himself away from the other horses, he's quiet, he stares out of the window. This really humanizes Spirit and makes him a very relatable character.
Little Creek is also a good character, being very free willed and gentle. The Colonel is very stubborn and set in his ways, which makes it all the more satisfying at the end when he keeps another man from shooting Spirit and Little Creek, letting them go with just a nod, as if to say "You win".
The movie is one of the best looking and best animated movies I've ever seen. The American fields and skyline look amazing, and the bright and clear blue sky adds colour to the dull and dry deserts. Moments like the sunset over the horizon were breathtaking and the falling snow becoming horses was easily one of the best moments of the movie, showing the emotional weight of Spirit's situation while also being a very beautiful scene. The way that the horses move and their body language is so well animated that you can imagine what they're feeling as they speak to each other. It's a shame that DreamWorks stopped making traditional movies after Sinbad because they did an amazing job of it.
Spirit was an amazing movie, not only was it a beautifully animated movie, but it was also very interestingly designed. Not having the horses talk and using the narrator as little as they did really made the movie a unique experience. Not to mention that the action in this movie got really tense, the characters were well established and the soundtrack, even if it was by Bryan Adams, was still really well done. I personally think that Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron should be up there with The Prince of Egypt and How to Train Your Dragon as one of DreamWorks' best animated features. I really recommend seeing this movie, even just out of curiosity sake, it's worth seeing.
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