George Orwell once wrote of H.G. Wells that “the
energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions – racial pride,
leader-worship, religious belief, love of war – which liberal intellectuals
mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed
so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.”
Here, Orwell is almost uncannily describing a great
deal of North America’s animation output over the years. The emotions he
mentions, which rest basically on the atavistic worship of strength and the
thrill of feeling oneself on the winning side, have been resolutely
inadmissible into the Disney paradigm that shapes so much of what our culture
feels is acceptable and/or appropriate for children. Any figure that seems to
embody such a mindset is invariably caricatured by animated films’ narratives
as a mean, stupid bully to be worsted at the end, or a delusionally blustering
idiot, or a crusty and unfeeling survivalist who will realize the error of his
ways, or a damaged/misguided figure who will repent and be forgiven, or simply
the “evil” villain. The putative “hero,” on the other hand, always has to be
some sort of muscular Christianity figure, for whom right makes might, and
somehow seems to possess the strength and courage to win through at the end
without really wanting or valuing the fact. Or the narrative must simply be
arranged so that other forces are at work which will ensure the victory of the
good without much egregious action from our hero/ine at all, and the implication
will simply be that it was their purity or heart and spotlessness of soul that
brought all the stars into alignment. It’s probably not a coincidence that a
lot of animated films have either female protagonists, or strong heroines
juxtaposed with somewhat de-masculinized or irresolute heroes. Even beyond the
obvious princess canon at Disney, there’s the decades-long Secret of NIMH/Last Unicorn/Fern Gully/Once Upon a Forest/Thumbelina/Anastasia/Quest for Camelot/The King
and I/Titan A.E. history to prove the point. This indicates a
general sense that any whiff of decisive masculine action will bring the film into the
territory of the “atavistic emotions that actually shape the world,” which we
of course know children are innocent of and must be protected from.
All this has the very obvious strike against it that
it runs totally against human nature, and the perversely pre-moral nature of
young children most of all. But animated films are made for children, not by
them, and the adults that make these films must balance their concern over what
they think children will like with what they think is appropriate for children,
and what the parents required to take the said children to these films will
think themselves. All this, however, is rooted in the belief that “animation =
for children,” and must thus reflect the most bigoted idea of what is
appropriate for children. It requires only a moment’s thought to realize that
this belief is arbitrary – in fact quite absurd – but it has nonetheless taken
invincible root in much of the West, and movie studios, accountable to the
stockholders of their corporate oligopolies, have to work with that fact.
Thus, the crucial fact that DreamWorks Animation was
only taken public as a company on October 27th, 2004. Before that,
it was simply a part of DreamWorks SKG – a private company owned by Steven
Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, incorporated with their own
money, and subject to no interests but their own. Thus, any kind of animated
movie they wanted could be produced there wholly at their own discretion.
2002’s Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,
was one of the results.
DreamWorks’s inaugural animated film, The Prince of Egypt – an epic re-telling
of the Book of Exodus – showed that Katzenberg had not yet fully shaken off the
habits acquired as head of animation production at Disney, where he was the
architect of the studio’s Little Mermaid/Beauty and the Beast/Aladdin/Lion King renaissance. Accordingly, The Prince of Egypt was still structured around periodic musical set pieces
where the characters spontaneously break into song, and the overall tone
of the film was tainted with an appalling moral falsity. The first sequences
shove lurid images of toiling and anguishing slaves in our faces, as if just to
make sure we get the point that this is bad. Zipporah’s characterization as an
obnoxious, violent, loudmouth is supposed to represent some sort of pop
feminism, and so she’s never contradicted or punished by the film. Aaron and
Miriam’s incredibly annoying and milksop-ish (respectively) characterizations
are likewise supposed to be funny and endearing. Whereas Pharaoh – both Patrick
Stewart’s Seti and Ralph Fiennes’s Rameses – seem like maturely dignified
figures, well-apportioned to the kingly exercise of power and force. We are thus supposed to hiss and boo. The Prince of Egypt was a visual masterpiece, no doubt, but its underlying sensibilities were as appalling as always.
Coming four years after The Prince of Egypt, with the moderately-recalibrated The Road to El Dorado in between, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron – a
revisionist western about a wild mustang named “Spirit” who is captured by the
US cavalry, and forced to go on an odyssey through the human world – is that
astonishing film that reflects filmmakers actually making the radical 180° turn
needed. Properly read, the film constitutes an almost point-for-point rebuttal
of the paradigm of kiddie animation described above. First and foremost, Spirit is a film that jettisons the feminized
passivity of other animated films, and glories in the masculine values of
strength, courage and indomitability of spirit. Captivity is not something to
be bemoaned and waited for rescue from, but something from which to exert all
your energies to escape. The chance to toss your opponents around like rag
dolls is not something to be avoided, or done only regretfully out of necessity, but to be seized with full sadistic
enjoyment. And the conscious drive necessary for great feats is – rather than
an antisocial element needing to be corrected – ultimately the only way of
establishing mutual respect between adversaries. The dispensing with the usual
childish clichés reaches such a point, in fact, that Spirit is probably nigh-unique in Hollywood history in that when the
hero shouts (or neighs the equivalent of) “Get away! Leave me!” the other
character is sensible enough to actually do so.
Although the film does not eschew anthropomorphism
of animals, it has the remarkable courage to forgo the talking animals trope
of so many animated films, and simply convey our equine hero’s emotions
through facial expressions and body language, supplemented by a spare
voice-over track by Matt Damon giving us Spirit’s inner monologue when
absolutely necessary. The film also does not shy away from relying on
horse-speak at times. A sample “dialogue” scene, I kid you not, plays out thus…
-- nickers
-- snorting
-- nickers
-- nickering
-- whinnies
-- chomp
-- neighs warningly
-- nickers determinedly
The refusal of talking-animals anthropomorphism is
for the very good reason that our hero is characterized from the very
first as an über-equus, whose strength, speed and fortitude have made him
undisputed leader of the herd, and will enable him to survive trials which
would break a lesser horse. Any suggestion that this is really just some human
in animal’s clothing, as in Wind in the Willows or a Beatrix Potter novel,
would destroy the film completely. We absolutely need to feel Spirit’s
full-on straining, snorting, virile stallion aspect for the film to work.
Interestingly, because Spirit has broken with most
animated filmmaking before it and decided to ennoble masculinity, it also ends
up able to respect the feminine principle that much more. The movie does, alas,
still incorporate some of the ersatz pop feminist aspect where it’s cute “girl
power” for the heroine to smugly denigrate and humiliate the hero, but here
it’s both truncated, contradicted, and karmically punished by the narrative. A
great improvement. Beyond this, however, the film is striking in that the
hero’s birth isn’t signified by the sort of loving pieta scene familiar from Bambi and The Lion King. Here, we actually see Spirit’s mother foaling, in full sweaty maternal pain, after
which we see him take his first suck at her teat. The father is nowhere to
be seen in this scene, or the film’s whole cosmogony. We are introduced to the
adult Spirit as leader of the herd, which one throw-away line of narration
alludes to his father having been before him, but nothing more is ever made of
this. A depressing number of animated films adopt a Catholic-style aesthetic of
pater filial piety in which the father may be tyrannical and wrong, but is still
the unanswerable temporal power, while the mother is sanctified out of all earthly
relevance. Spirit rejects this, and
makes the mother a figure of full temporal authority – apparently Spirit’s
deputy leader while he’s around, and his replacement in his absence.
No animated film that I can think of has ever gone
as far as Spirit in trying to be
simply an epic film, which just happens to be realized through animation.
Ultimately though, Katzenberg & Co. remained aware that they were still
subject to the preconceptions about animation held by North American audiences,
and still had the modulate things somewhat. As with the Disney films of
yesteryear, Spirit makes you do some
interpretive work to get to its full thematic import, having cloaked this in an
aesthetic that initially seems diametrically opposed. But whereas with Disney
back in the early 1940s it was simply a thuggishly infantile and parochial
moral sensibility, here in 2002 it’s a pop aesthetic that seems aimed squarely
at twelve-year old girls. After that remarkable foaling scene, the next few scenes
are devoted to Spirit back when he was an impossibly cute little colt, doing
things like neighing earnestly at a kindly and indulgent herd of buffalo, or
trotting along with exaggerated dignity and nonchalance after getting his
tongue stuck to a huge icicle, which he now has to carry around in his mouth.
On top of all this, there’s a Bryan Adams soundtrack that even wholly
sympathetic viewers like myself must admit doesn’t add all that much to the
proceedings. And ultimately, there are a number of images (see above left) which,
although brilliantly executed in terms of visual density and detail, are
perhaps just the slightest bit too “awww, how gorgeous!” in their affect.
The film’s contradictions are perhaps best
exemplified in a third-act sequence where Spirit is press-ganged into a team of
horses which are being made to haul a locomotive over a mountain which the
Pacific Railroad is tunneling under. Upon reaching the crest of the hill, and
seeing the vista beyond, there’s a dramatic moment where Spirit finally
understands that the humans are trying to extend their dominion into “his
homeland” – a realization that reawakens all of his inner reserves of strength
and courage. Pretending to fall down dead from overwork, he’s taken out of his
harness, at which point he resurges and thunderously gallops back to the prow
of the locomotive. Rearing up and drawing upon all his super-equine strength,
he smashes his hooves down full force on the couplings to the horse teams, and
staves them in. The other horses are free, and the locomotive begins to slide
back down the mountain, gathering momentum as it does, finally smashing into
the depot at the bottom of the hill, causing a ferocious explosion which starts
a violent inferno, the firestorm quickly engulfing the railway construction
yard and spreading to the treeline, as Spirit gallops furiously away from it.
And behind him, at the edges of the frame, you can see that the DreamWorks
animators have cannily made sure that we notice that all the cute squirrels and
rabbits and deer in the forest are getting away too.
This sort of thing notwithstanding however, Spirit is an amazing intervention in
animated filmmaking. It features a fetishism of the phrase “my homeland,” a Braveheart-worthy emphasis on “freedom,”
and a running visual motif of aligning Spirit with a soaring eagle – purged
here of its connotations of full-on military nationalism and imperialism, but
still symbolizing his strength and indomitability. A moment in the film’s
denouement has a Lakota brave he’s befriended reveal the etymology of the movie’s
title – by giving him the tribal name “Spirit-Who-Could-Not-Be-Broken.”
