W
e watched Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron the other night. We've had the soundtrack playing routinely in the house for months now -- I remember that soundtrack being one of the first pieces of music that I consciously sought out and loved, and it's very deep in emotional memory bank now.
Elena liked the movie, but unfortunately on my end, it didn't hold up very well. The animation is not great, especially the human beings and the frequent switching into CGI. There's nothing wrong with a simple story, but this one felt a little too emotionally manipulative for me -- it was very clear what emotions the film was trying to make me feel, basically at all times. The characters aren't great either -- Little Creek just rubbed me the wrong way, just this simpishly virtuous noble savage archetype that didn't bring a lot forward. Also, Spirit gets captured three times in this movie! That's too many, find a different plot point, guys.
One of the funnier things about the plot of Spirit is the way that it's portrayed as a success story at the expense of the expansionist white men, but it's staggeringly clear that Spirit has won only a very temporary reprieve for his homeland through his antics. In the climactic sequence, Spirit "frees" a bunch of horses from dragging a train over a mountain when he realizes the railway is heading for his home, and then sends the train careening down the wrong way. First of all, all the horses that escaped were bound together by all their harnesses, and will get nowhere, shortly to be rounded up within a day. Second of all, the loss of the train would clearly only delay the railway project by a couple of weeks, to a month at most. Spirit had a grand old adventure, and he might even die before the Americans get West (to capture him a fourth time); but there's a sharp futility to all his actions that he, being a horse, amusingly does not understand.