A DreamWorks animated feature in the old hand-drawn style: a horse odyssey after the fashion of the thrice-filmed Will James novel, Smoky, with the four-legged hero falling into many hands on his roundabout way home (which looks to be in the vicinity of Monument Valley, nowhere near the vicinity of the Cimarron River), but with the main difference that in this case the only good master is no master. Even the puckish, Peter Pannish Indian, with whom the horse reaches a mutually beneficial rapprochement, is not granted the privileges of ownership. (The horse is called Spirit because, among other reasons, he can't be broken.) But this is a precociously PC horse: the Indian is good, the white-eye is bad, the railroad is the snake in the Garden of Eden. He is also a thoughtful, if naggingly single-minded, horse: his interior speaking voice is the tranquilized one of Matt Damon ("They say the mustang is the spirit of the West"), and his interior singing voice is the constipated one of Bryan Adams ("Here I am, so young and strong,/ Right here in the place where I belong"). Thankfully, there are no cute animal sidekicks, voiced by stand-up comics, on whom to press his views. He keeps himself, as they say, to himself. Some of the images of equine speed and grace -- the horse outpacing the shadow of an eagle, for instance -- are nicely done. And the drummed-on theme of freedom is irremovably germane to the Western genre. And Hans Zimmer's epic score, with its echoes of Lonesome Dove and Silverado, is doubtless idiomatic. Yet, in its fierce denial of the melancholy complexity of the genre, this is a Western strictly for kids. Of all ages. Directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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