Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

7 years ago before Shrek 2 and a host of other animations from the same animation company made their way to the cinemas, Dreamworks released an animation that went by the title of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Now back then when I saw the promotional posters and videos, I thought it wasn't much of an animation. I remember how terrible Disney's Dinosours looked, so I cleverly avoided Spirit and watched other movies instead.

A few years down the road, sitting at home one night I was surprised to find Spirit showing on local tv. Curious to see what I had missed out on, I decided to give it a chance and see if it was as lousy as I thought it was.

For one, Spirit had no talking animals. No talking sidekicks, no talking ogres and talking what-nots. The show featured only horses that neighed on and on, and unless you spoke Bahasa Kuda, you would likely find it to either be weird or just downright annoying. Couple that with Dreamworks' decision to blend traditional hand-drawings with 3D instead of applying full CGI glory like it did with Shrek, it's not too hard to see why some reviewers happily laid waste to Spirit.

16 / Portland Oregonian / Shawn Levy

The animation is dull, the thought is fuzzy, the storytelling is vague and the music just plain stinks.

But at the end of the show, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Spirit was actually a pretty good movie. I don't know what was wrong with Shawn Levy, because I honestly thought that Spirit scored really well in many areas. Entertaining, exciting, riveting, and yet brilliantly contemplative all the way. In short, I liked it!

Problem is, I haven't yet heard of anyone else who's actually fond of the show. Which is why I thought of putting up this post, to see if there's anyone else out there who had seen the entire show and thinks it's a great piece of animation too. Anybody??

Or am I indeed one of the few oddballs in the world who actually found a liking to Spirit? :D