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Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
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Although this fact would not be evident to many members of the
general filmgoing public, there are certain movies whose reviews, across the
board, are largely derived from the press material handed out by studios and distributors.
This is not usually a matter of payola. It occurs especially when
reviewers, lacking imagination and facing a tight deadline, encounter a film
that is genuinely unusual or original.
This animated feature from a major studio, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, is one such film. It is quite
simply the most surprising mainstream release of its year, in both its content
and form.
Even those reviewers who do not rely on press kits might decide,
lazily, to detach themselves from this film within its first few minutes.
Sweeping imagery follows the flight of an eagle as it presents us to a panorama
of the American West, while the first of many Bryan Adams songs extols the
virtues of freedom, beauty and the unfenced wilderness.
Soon we are into a scene of traditional, Disney-style
anthropomorphism. A stallion, Spirit, is born. The women of his breed nurture
him and the men offer the tough, life lessons, as the child cutely runs and
plays.
The film hits its stride once we reach the adult life and times of
Spirit. Now social history enters the picture. And our hero is a free spirit
reluctant to let himself be caged and tamed by anyone, be it a gentle Native
American or an army of marauding soldiers.
The publicity material on this film presents it as the work of
producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, producer at DreamWorks studios. This rather
obscures the contribution of co-directors Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook. Of course animation,
more than any other cinematic form, is intensely collaborative.
Nonetheless, the style of the film, fusing visual fluidity with a
carefully composed orchestral score by Hans Zimmer, is often awe-inspiring.
Even the Bryan Adams songs are an integral part of the whole. Not since
Terrence
Amusingly,
one commentator found “peculiarly feminine” the unusual love triangle which
colours the film. This is the gentle and rather lovely interaction between Spirit, the mare to whom he becomes attracted, and the
latter’s Native American rider. Watching the mare cavort with her human friend,
Spirit is compelled to ponder whether such inter-species affection is
‘natural’. Naturally, the film itself supports such overflowing love.
Sadly, it has become something of a reflex among some critics to
mock as terminally politically correct any entertainment film that exhibits a
liberal conscience about ecology or the rights of indigenous people. When the
movie is Pocahontas (1995), and
political conscience is a matter of trading in superficial stereotypes, the
mockery has a point.
However, as a political film, Spirit:
Stallion of the Cimarron raises itself to an altogether
bolder class. And here another unsung auteur appears, the talented screenwriter John Fusco, known for
progressive Westerns such as Thunderheart (1992)
and the Young Guns series. In some
sense, Spirit is what critics
used to call a revisionist Western. That is, it sifts through the conventional
iconography of the genre and criticises its standard values.
There are no cowboys on display here, for example. It is a Western
told from the viewpoint of animals and Native Americans, in which the white
cavalry figures as the beastly villain.
At this level, the story is straightforward but effective. A long sequence in which Spirit, his fellow horses and a Native
American all figure as prisoners of fascistic white men leads to a rousing
breakout and victory for the oppressed.
But stronger stuff is yet to come (it should be noted for parents
that several, extremely intense scenes in the film can leave very small
children wailing with angst). Spirit’s lyrical voice-over reflection (spoken by
Matt Damon) poses to us at the outset an unusual question. It is up to us to
In many ways, what the film offers us is a fully prelapsarian
vision of the West, Eden ‘before the fall’. None of the usual signs of Western
civilisation (like towns or territorial boundaries) have encroached by the
Indeed, the most remarkable and haunting passage of the movie is
devoted to Spirit’s militant attack on the sole image of that civilisation, the
first train designed to cross and bridge different parts of the country. This
has traditionally been a triumphant or (at a pinch) ambiguous image in the
Western (recall the American mythology of the pioneer train as, precisely, an
Iron Horse). Here it is a full-blown symbol of evil.
Spirit’s apocalyptic destruction of the train – the battle between
a real horse and an Iron Horse – is an ecstatic, utopian moment. For in this
moment we leave history and enter an unusual realm of myth, an imagining of
what the West would be if the white man had never colonised it.
These are not the kind of dark, subversive thoughts one usually
entertains these days while watching a
MORE
Fusco:
© Adrian Martin June 2002 |
