| Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron\r\nVoices by Matt Damon and James Cromwell. Directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook. Written by John Fusco. Rated G. |
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High Plains Drifter
Wild horses can’t drag any life into the maudlin Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
By Kristian Lin
You were born with the pride of the lords great and olden / Who danced, through the ages, in corridors golden ... O bronco that would not be broken of dancing.” Thus wrote Vachel Lindsay in his ode to the horse that’s a metaphor for the human spirit that refuses to submit. As a hardened male urbanite who’s always been particularly resistant to most forms of nostalgia, I must confess the romance of horses roaming on the open plain has never held much for me. Nevertheless, I think there’s more than that to why Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron doesn’t work.
The movie’s title character is a proud stallion who leads a herd of wild horses in the Great Plains during the latter half of the 19th century. Thankfully, the horses don’t speak to each other in human voices, so we’re spared scads of embarrassing dialogue. Instead, Matt Damon’s voiceover narrates the story from Spirit’s point of view. U.S. soldiers capture him and corral him, and a scowling Army colonel (voiced by James Cromwell) tries to tame him, but they can’t break Spirit, because he’s meant to run free! Like the wind!
This burst of irony is occasioned by the fact that the movie has none of that quality. Being irony-free isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it sure is here. The unrelieved celebration of a bygone time and the wearisomely simplistic characters will make you long for the relative subtlety of Disney’s Pocahontas. The film’s forced and unbearably cutesy attempts at humor mostly revolve around Spirit abusing his military captors (although, truthfully, they’re about as menacing as the henchmen in Disney musicals). Later, the horse is rescued by a gentle Lakota Indian (voiced by Daniel Studi). The unmistakable implication is that the natives know how to treat the horses — a politically correct stereotype that does no one any favors.
The hand-drawn animation looks fine, although the use of color is ham-fisted — shiny bright colors to depict Spirit’s idyllic life on the plain contrasted with gray shades for his life in captivity. The sequence with a train locomotive plummeting down the side of a hill is particularly notable. The thing is, it’s only notable for the way it’s drawn, because the script hasn’t built any dramatic urgency into the situation; we don’t care what happens when the train reaches the bottom. Unless it’s flat-out extraordinary, the drawing style is irrelevant when the story and characters aren’t there. Look no further than Ice Age for proof of that.
If you need one more nail in this movie’s coffin, the soundtrack is loaded with Bryan Adams songs. Believe it or not, this project actually makes the scratchy-voiced rocker look worse than usual, because his syrupy, witless songs add so little to the dramatic context. (“I hear the wind call your name / It calls me back home again.” He ain’t Vachel Lindsay, that’s for sure.) Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is about running free in the Old West’s vast expanses, but there’s no air in this movie’s open plains. Just treacle.
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