ANI-MOVIES, *Spirit Untamed

DreamWorks' Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimmaron from 2002 was memorable enough to remake the western adventure into an original animated TV series for Netflix in 2017 titled Spirit Riding Free which was more geared towards girls since My Little Pony had rekindled interest in equines just not the talking pastel-colored kinds with wings. This followed up in a totally separate theatrical release through Universal inspired by the TV series called Spirit Untamed in a fully-CGI animated movie that unfortunately underperformed at the box office making a profit just above the production cost. Written by Kristin Haun with producer Aury Wallington, the movie is a fresh take on the Spirit franchise that acts as a remake of the Netflix show while also acting as a pseudo-sequel to the original movie, so you don't need to have sampled any of the previous Spirit installments to watch this.

At the dawn of the 20th Century, young Lucky is the daughter of a train designer Jim Prescott and circus horse rider Milagro. Milagro dies from an accident during her act, leaving baby Lucky sent to live with Jim's rich father and his older sister Cora. A decade passes with Lucky being casted out of her grandfather's home after she unintentionally sabotages his efforts to run for governor, so she and Cora head back to the west to live with Jim in his town of Miradero. On the train ride, Lucky witnesses some wild horses running by lead by a fiery mustang. Once in Miradero, Lucky finds that stallion had been captured by some crooked-looking wranglers and taken to a local corral. She calls the horse Spirit and tries to win the horse's affections. Lucky befriends resident girls Abigail and Pru who teach her how to charm Spirit, even though her efforts set the horse free, and they all discover that Spirit has a herd he watches over. The herd gets taken by the same wranglers from before lead by the evil Hendricks who is a dead ringer for Nasty Canasta from the old Daffy Duck cartoons, and they get away in their own stolen train, so not only are they horse thieves but train robbers too. Lucky and her friends plan to stop Hendricks' and his gang before they make off with herd on an illegal boat at a harbor, all while Spirit and Lucky form a close bond to each other. Spirit ends up getting taken too, but Lucky's father shows up in his own faster prototype train engine and are there to help the girls stop Hendricks. Unlike in the TV series, Lucky says goodbye to Spirit who returns to his herd in the wild instead of becoming her pet horse.

Spirit Untamed acted accordingly as its own movie which can be enjoyed as a totally solo story, even though DreamWorks had to produce this with a lower than normal budget and having the animation done by an outside studio. The CGI animation is signifigantly better than what was done for the Spirit Riding Free series and is theatrical quality. In an alternate take from the TV show, the movie characters are given a more layered backstory and depth especially for Lucky learning on the legacy her mother left behind. The only true setback is Abigail's bad habit of singing off-key ditties at the most inappropriate times. The winning draw for this is the voice actors with Walton Coggins living up to his career of playing bad guys as Hendricks, Jake Gyllenhaal as Lucky's passive father, and Julianne Moore as the well-meaning but slightly snobbish aunt. The entire film is an invigorating take on westerns but steered more towards girls bringing a breeze of equality to the male-centric genre.