Art of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
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Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is an animation movie produced by DreamWorks Animation and directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook in 2002. The film follows Spirit, a Kiger mustang stallion, who is captured during the American Indian Wars by the United States Cavalry; he is freed by a Native American man named Little Creek who attempts to lead him back into the Lakota village. In contrast to the way animals are portrayed in an anthropomorphic style in other animated features, Spirit and his fellow horses communicate with each other through non-linguistic sounds and body language like real horses.
The film was directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook (in their feature directional debuts) from a screenplay by John Fusco, who produced the film alongside Mireille Soria. Fusco, best known for his work in the Western and Native American genres (such as the films Young Guns and Young Guns II), was hired by DreamWorks Animation to create an original screenplay based on an idea by Jeffrey Katzenberg. Fusco began by writing and submitting a novel to the studio and then adapted his own work into screenplay format. He remained on the project as the main writer over the course of four years, working closely with Katzenberg, the directors, and the artists.
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron was made over the course of four years using a conscious blend of traditional hand-drawn animation and computer animation. James Baxter said that the animation was the most difficult piece of production he worked on for a movie: "I literally spent the first few weeks with my door shut, telling everyone, 'Go away; I've got to concentrate.' It was quite daunting because when I first started to draw horses, I suddenly realized how little I knew." The team at DreamWorks, under his guidance, used a horse named "Donner" as the model for Spirit and brought the horse to the animation studio in Glendale, California for the animators to study. Sound designer Tim Chau was dispatched to stables outside Los Angeles to record the sounds of real horses; the final product features real hoof beats and horse vocals that were used to express their vocalizations in the film. None of the animal characters in the film speak English beyond occasional reflective narration from the protagonist mustang, voiced by Matt Damon in the film. Many of the animators who worked on Spirit would later work on Shrek 2, as their influence can be seen in the character Donkey. The production team, consisting of Kelly Asbury, Lorna Cook, Mireille Soria, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Kathy Altieri, Luc Desmarchelier, Ron Lukas, and story supervisor Ronnie del Carmen took a trip to the western United States to view scenic places they could use as inspiration for locations in the film. The homeland of the mustangs and Lakotas is based on Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park, and the Teton mountain range; the cavalry outpost was also based on Monument Valley.
The pictures on this page are a collection of artworks created for this movie.
THE STORY
In the 19th-century American West, a bald eagle flies over the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon to the forest. There, a Kiger mustang colt, Spirit, is born to a herd of wild horses. Spirit grows into a stallion and assumes the leadership of the herd. One night, upon following a strange light near his herd, Spirit finds horses kept in chains and their wranglers sleeping around a campfire. They awake and, seeing him as a magnificent specimen, seize him and take him away, to a US cavalry fort.
In captivity, Spirit encounters "The Colonel", who orders the mustang to be tamed; however, Spirit defies all attempts to tame him. To weaken Spirit, the Colonel has him tied to a post for three days without food or water. Meanwhile, a Lakota Native American named Little Creek is also brought into the fort and held captive. Spirit is weak enough that the Colonel sits on his back, boasting that any wild horse can eventually be tamed. Spirit gets a second wind and dumps him. Humiliated, the Colonel attempts to shoot him before Little Creek who frees himself from his bonds with a knife, and saves Spirit from being shot as they make their escape from the fort…
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