When the best part of a movie is the song used in the trailer (Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams”), it’s time to rethink your strategy. “Spirit Untamed,” from Dreamworks Animation, has vivid moments of beauty, but it loses its stride with a witty tale about identity as it tries to define itself as a “empowering” film for young girls, missing the point on both counts.
Milagro Navarro (voiced by Eiza González, “I Care A Lot”), a fearless horse-riding stunt act, dazzles the spectators in Miradero, while her husband Jim (Jake Gyllenhaal) and daughter Fortuna, or “Lucky” (Isabela Merced, “Dora and the Lost City of Gold”) watch in awe. After a tragic accident, Jim loses his mother and Lucky is taken to live with her Grandpa and Aunt Cora (Julianne Moore), where she spends the next decade attempting, and delightfully failing, to be a proper young woman.
Lucky returns to Miradero with Aunt Cora after an event that embarrasses her grandfather, where a scruffy Jim awaits, unaware that his baby girl is now a brilliant and rebellious 12-year-old who is not so willing to take her father back in her life. Lucky rapidly meets two other girls, Pru (Marsai Martin, “Little”) and Abigail (McKenna Grace, “Annabelle Comes Home”), and as she bonds with a wild stallion she names “Spirit,” she gradually becomes more at ease.
Spirit’s herd is kidnapped by a band of horse wranglers, who plan to auction them off to a life of captivity and hard labor. As Lucky begins to build a rapport with the rebellious stallion, a group of horse wranglers kidnaps Spirit’s herd. Lucky and her companions embark on an expedition to save Spirit’s family.
The “Spirit” brand began with the 2002 film “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” in which moviegoers fell in love with the stunning 2D animation aesthetic that the Netflix series that followed, “Spirit Riding Free,” nonchalantly abandoned. In an attempt to define the exuberant girl-meets-wild-horse genre, director Elaine Bogan (a veteran of multiple Dreamworks programs, making her feature debut) takes some paradoxical decisions in both story and animation that fail to improve either.
When there are no humans or animals in the frame, production designer Paul Duncan (“Abominable”) impresses – the background is simply gorgeous. The design team’s Monet-like use of vibrant colors, lighting, and textures could easily be shown in a museum. When living, breathing characters enter the scene, however, there’s a technological clash between the beauty of the landscape and the circa-2012 Barbie-movie CGI used to animate the people and horses, which takes away the emotional undercurrent of this story about a young girl discovering who she truly is.
Both in terms of narrative and graphics, that story falls short. Screenwriters Aury Wallington (“Gravity Falls”) and Kristin Hahn (“Anthem”) have created a patchwork girl’s “empowerment” story of self-discovery that fully avoids Lucky’s search for identity. A token effort is made to emphasize Lucky’s Latino heritage, with repeated, superfluous injections of Spanish (despite the fact that Lucky doesn’t speak a word of it) to illustrate her Latinidad, but nothing more. The authors overlook the reality that speaking Spanish does not automatically constitute someone Latino, and that those of us who do speak Spanish do not spontaneously shout words in Spanish just because we can.
The haphazard attempt at Latinidad isn’t over yet. The setting is clearly identified as the Old West, and anyone of Latin ancestry is almost certainly Mexican. Milagro’s troop of performing horsewomen, known as “Las Caballeras,” has ancient roots in Spain. If Fortuna is Mexican, a more suitable name might be “Las Escaramuzas” or “Las Adelitas.” (The latter term was originally applied to ladies on horseback who were used as decoys during the Mexican revolution, but it is now applied to female rodeo performers.) This section of the story demonstrates why more Latino writers are needed in any fiction that aims to depict Latino culture.
“Spirit Untamed” tries to be everything, and because of that, it fails. It’s a film that’s a bit too juvenile for anyone over the age of 8, but trotting far too slowly to hold the attention of elementary-aged children, leaving parents with just another expensive nap at the movies.
The film “Spirit Untamed” will be released in theaters in the United States on June 4th.
