Mark Reviews Movies: SPIRIT UNTAMED

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 3, 2021

Despite and besides the name and the breed of horse, Spirit Untamed has nothing to do with the 2002 movie Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. The horse, a wild mustang stallion, seems to be the same, but unlike the preceding-in-spirit movie, the horse isn't the central character here. That's a bit of a positive, since there's little to no attempt to anthropomorphize the stallion—only a few exaggerated facial expressions and not a single line of narration. It looks and behaves like a horse, nothing more and nothing less.

We accept the animal, in other words, as it gallops free out West at an unspecified moment in history, rejects the corral into which a gang of wranglers have trapped it, and forms a tenuous bond with a 13-year-old girl, who has moved to this frontier town after spending most of her life in an intentionally sheltered existence. The horse just wants to be free, and so, too, does the girl, who just wants a little bit of adventure in her life. She ends up getting a lot of it.

Adapted from the television show "Spirit Riding Free," this is a very simple story—about a girl and a horse (not "her" horse, to make it clear), yes, but also about youthful friendship and a worrying, overbearing father and a point-A-to-point-B plot, with a lot of bonding—not to mention more than a few obstacles and perils—along the way. Directed by Elaine Bogan, the movie's simplicity is its greatest strength.

The screenplay by Aury Wallington (who created the TV show) and Kristin Hahn doesn't attempt to be about anything significant, in terms of either the history or the politics of whichever period during which the story is set, or particularly deep. It's just an old-fashioned adventure, with some broad comedy, some broader character, and an even broader sense of action. It's a bit too broad in all of these ways, as well as in terms of the quality of its animation, and while the movie's heart for the simple matters of narrative is admirable, that only gets this story, clocking in at an rushed 87 minutes (including some significantly lengthy credits), so far.

The girl is named Fortuna, nicknamed and primarily called "Lucky" (voice of Isabela Merced), whose luck in life conveniently arrives around the time the story begins. Her mother was a champion rodeo rider, who was killed in an accident during a show. The image of the baby Lucky reaching for a ribbon, as the rest of the crowd rises in shock, is effective in its subtlety. There isn't much more to be found as the rest of the story unfolds.

More than a decade later, Lucky has been causing problems (lots of little accidents that escalate to disaster), so her aunt Cora (voice of Julianne Moore) believes it's time for the girl return to her original home out West. The two arrive in a quaint frontier town, where Lucky's father Jim (voice of Jake Gyllenhaal) owns a house on a hill. He's desperate to keep Lucky safe (His scattered collection of dynamite tells a different story about his sense of safety), but Lucky wants to experience life.

She makes a couple of friends: plucky human girls her age, named Pru (voice of Marsai Martin) and Abigail (Mckenna Grace), and a wild horse, captured to be broken by a gang of outlaws, that she names "Spirit." When the leader of the gang (voiced by Walton Goggins) captures the rest of Spirit's herd, the three girls mount their horses and set out to head a train off at the pass.

The rest of the plot, which has at least established a cast of likeable and eccentric characters, amounts to many scenes of derring-do, such as a long leap across a chasm and balancing along a lengthy and incredibly narrow ridge. The girls sing and laugh and eat marshmallows around a campfire. If there isn't anything more to these characters than their distinctive personalities (Luck and Pru are serious, while Abigail is the comic relief), the general sense of friendship among the girls is strong. Meanwhile, Jim, Cora, and Pru's father (voiced by Andre Braugher) figure out what the girls are up to, and they plan a rescue effort—hopefully before the young teens have to confront the bandits. There's really not much more to say, except that the whole journey climaxes with a big brawl, with the girls and the horses taking on the gang of misanthropes.

In addition to how scant the story and the characters are, this adventure also suffers from its bland animation style. Abandoning the hand-drawn animation of its predecessor and embracing the computer-based medium of the show, Bogan does ensure that the backdrops and the lighting here are fairly striking (The filmmakers' love of a painted sky is constantly apparent). The characters and animals, rendered in a more cartoonish fashion, are missing the same level of loving detail, though (The horses' hair, for example, is noticeably flat).

Such specifics probably won't matter to the movie's target audience (although one wonders how much of the TV show's story and aesthetic have been copied here—and if that will matter to said audience). For everyone else, though, Spirit Untamed almost gives us a chance to recapture a youthful sense of adventure.

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