Spirit is a nice little old fashioned animated film.  The story is about a wild horse who is forcibly taken from the pastoral splendor of the Cimarron area of the early 19^th century.  Cimarron is a river in the western United States flowing from New Mexico through Kansas.   Spirit, whose story is told in the first person by narrator Matt Damon, is captured and forced to live with crude, rough US soldiers.  He escapes captivity though the help of a native American named Little Creek (voiced by Daniel Studi).  He then lives a short time with a tribe of native Americans and falls in love with one of the tribes mares.  That’s pretty much the whole story. 

Considering the film was produced by the always politically correct Dreamworks, I’m sure you can guess that the soldiers treated him poorly, and though he was suspicious, he was treated with respect while in the company of Little Creek and his native American tribe.  The story reminds me of a Jack London novel.  Well two of them actually...  “White Fang” and “Call of the Wild”.   White Fang was about a wolf taken out of the wild to live with humans.  Call of the Wild was about a dog taken from civilization and forced to live in the wild.   Or was it the other way around?  Hmm.  Dog, wolf, horse.  I dunno.  The point is those two stories and Spirit are told from the point of view of an animal taken out of his normal life style.

Since the basis of the story revolves around the natural right of the horses to have their freedom, I became curious about the history of the horse in America.  I discovered that horses roamed North America about 10,000 years ago but were wiped out in the ice age along with the wooly mammoth.  In 1527 horses were re-introduced to North America by the explorer DeSoto who brought in 237 horses.   A number of the horses were reportedly stolen by the native American tribes and were bred to form the Chickasaw Horse breed.  Some horses escaped the native American tribes and formed wild packs of horses that roamed the countryside.  So even though the film implies that the North American wild horses were always free, in reality they were actually descendants of domesticated horses brought to American from Europe and the Middle East.

Enough history, back to the film…There are some computer generated scenes here and there, like the beautiful scene of an eagle soaring across the majesty that was the old West, but unlike most recent animated films it appears that most of Spirit was hand drawn.  While Spirit does not bring us any new technology, it does have one unusual feature  –the animated animals in the film do not talk.  Well, not really.  Spirit narrates the film, but does not actually talk on screen, and neither do any of the other animals.  But they do communicate with winks, nods, and many other non-verbal human cues and facial expressions, etc.  The animals had all the other characteristics of humans (love, hate, anger, etc.) though.  This non-verbal approach to animal animation made Spirit seem more like a natural wildlife film, but it also made it a bit annoying.  Like watching a mime for almost two hours.

But overall I enjoyed the film.  It had some nice animation, good action scenes near the end and a simple but pleasant story.

     -- Pappy ( 2 1/2 out of 4 pops )

Talk about this film with other Popkorn Junkies

      Patsy ( 2 1/2 out of 4 pops )

      "Spirit" was a nice movie.  It wasn't great, it wasn't outstanding, it was just nice.  It was like watching a really, really long music video-- Bryan Adams did the soundtrack and since horses don't talk, the soundtrack is basically the only thing you get to listen to.  The plot was sort of ok-- I mean, it's just about a horse-- how interesting can that be?  There were semi funny parts and semi exciting parts but nothing great.  Sorry, I just wasn't too thrilled by this film.