Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)

Directed by: Kelly Asbury & Lorna Cook
Written by: John Fusco
Music by: Hans Zimmer (score) and Bryan Adams (songs)

Production Started On: February 22, 1999
Released on: May 24th, 2002 (pushed back from its original November 22, 2001 slot)
Running Time: 82 minutes

Budget: $48 million (officially, though it was estimated at $80 million plus another $30 million in marketing cost)
U.S. Opening Weekend: $23.213 million over 3,317 screens
Box-Office: $73.215 million in the U.S., $120.7 million worldwide
Video Revenue: $103.2 million in DVD and VHS rentals and sales (with sales of nearly 6 million units)

CAST

Cavalry Colonel... James Cromwell (Gene Hackman was reportedly offered the part)
Little Creek... Daniel Studi
Narrator... Matt Damon
Bryan Adams

STORY

A near-silent film set in America's Western Frontier in the 1800s, Spirits is the rousing tale of a wild and rambunctious mustang stallion named Spirit and his journey through the untamed American West. Along the way he falls in love with a beautiful paint mare named Rain, develops a remarkable friendship with a young Lakota brave, and becomes one of the greatest unsung heroes of the Old West. Through the eyes of Spirit, we follow the story of the westward movement, as the mustang runs free across the American countryside and sees his life changed by the slow but inexorable push of civilization in the wild. The film first introduces Spirit in the freedom of the wild, only to have him caught by the cavalry and trained to be a war horse.

INTERESTING FACTS

A 2D/CG composite coming from DreamWork's Glendale animation house, Katzenberg calls Spirits "the return" to traditional animation's roots. He went on to say that this is the project that he is currently most excited about.

Though official title is Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, it was also named for a long time Spirit of the West, and went by the simpler working title of Spirit.

The Cimarron from Spirit's title is a medium-sized tailwater stream which flows out of Eagle Nest Lake and is partially hidden in a beautiful canyon in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

The movie features photo-realistic horses set against panoramic vistas and very little dialogue. The whole story will be told from the viewpoint of the horse, with his thoughts heard as narrative.

This is the first animated film shot in the very wide CinemaScope ratio format (panoramic view) since Anastasia (1997).

On April 3, 2000, Steven Spielberg managed to get a look at some footage and was apparently leaping for joy over what he saw.

DreamWorks bought a Kiger Stallion named "Donner" from a rancher for $50,000 (which is considered to be a high price). Donner will be used as the model for the horse, Spirit in this film. Kiger Stallions are noteworthy because they are a wild breed with traits that can be traced back to the breeds brought over by the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th centuries. Donner was most likely chosen so that DreamWorks can work off a horse that is most like what a wild horse in the 18th century, like Spirit, might've looked like.

James Baxter (already responsible for Belle, Rafiki, Quasimodo, Tulio and Moses in the burning bush scene) will be animating the title character in Spirit.

The movie was described by a first reviewer, in early July 2001, as more of an epic western than a cartoon: "stylized without being overly cartoony", with "some of the most beautiful horses ever seen in animation."

Though horses do not talk -they "just whine and make horse noise"-, a Narrator is the "voice" of Spirit.

John McClane, the hero of the Die Hard movies, was a chief inspiration for the wild horse who triumphs over adversity.

A teaser for Spirit premiered on the Shrek DVD in October 2001.

A first trailer was shown at Siggraph in August 2001, at a panel about the use of Linux at Dreamworks -who are using Linux exclusively for this production. "It starts out with music (in a John Williams' style) and a horse standing on a cliff, the clouds are in the shape of horses. Then it pans over with an eagle/hawk flying over, follows the eagle/hawk through the clouds, over the plains, into the canyons (Grand?) and the narrator starts speaking, pans over the river in the canyon, then over onto some mesas and finally to the herd of horses running . That's it for any context. The narrator (first person/horse) says how many stories have been told of how the West was won (or came to be) but never a story from the horse's point of view. 'I remember when the horses ran free.... this is that story.' "

Head of technology Ed Leonard says, "To dramatically reduce costs was one of the big motivating factors in moving animators to Linux. But, it is our animators' productivity that really counts. Telling the story well, not the underlying technology, is what matters to us. Microsoft software continues to play a key role in our overall business, but Linux is particularly well suited to animation production pipelines.''

Dreamworks reportedly contacted both Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon to write music for this film, and Robert Redford to narrate it.

Bryan Adams announced in an official update to fanclub members in December 2001 that he would be "the voice of the main character, a horse, in Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron." The Canadian singer made a trip to Los Angeles over the summer and in early October 2001 to record his voice overs for the movie. He also wrote songs with Mutt Lange and Gretchen Peters to name a few, for the May 2002 soundtrack that is expected to contain "at least 11" of them -official releases mentioned only 6 to 8. Titles already known include "Here I Am," "Get off of My Back," "Sound the Bugle" and "I Will Always Return."

Nevertheless, and in spite of DreamWorks previously releasing a teaser trailer in Canada featuring Bryan Adams' voice-over, it was officially announced in February 2002 that Matt Damon would be narrating the movie. "We spent four years trying to find the perfect voice that could capture a spirited, heroic character," said DreamWorks' animation overseer, Jeffrey Katzenberg. "Matt had everything we hoped for, a genuine enthusiasm for life that comes through melodically in his voice." Eight new songs written and sung by Bryan Adams will indeed fill in the story blanks. Matt Damon met the real-life model for Spirit in the horse flesh. "It was a beautiful thing, those two together," said Katzenberg, who adds with a chuckle, "They did have a contest over who was the bigger star."

Jeffrey Katzenberg noted during a ShoWest presentation in March 2002 that in the successful wake of such movies as his own CGI-animated Shrek and Pixar/Disney's Monsters, Inc., "pundits are sounding the death knell of 2-D animation," which could be premature since "Spirit represents an attempt to revitalize a unique and exceptional art form." The film, Katzenberg said, "is more complex than Shrek but done in a way to make it invisible." Referring to the competitive summer that is shaping up, Jeffrey Katzenberg said of Spirit: "It has been made literally for every audience, every age group -- every human will be able to see it after they've seen Spider-Man and Star Wars."

Bryan Adams commented that he hasn't "stopped making music as people keep implying. Up to 1998, I did four albums in four years. Since then I've been doing a lot of touring. Maybe it's a good thing Spirit came along. It'll help put me back in the public eye." About the movie's May 18 world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, rocker Bryan Adams explains: "We'll be presenting the entire film live to picture. I'll be on stage with a six-piece band that includes (composer) Hans Zimmer. I'll be standing there singing the songs. The Spirit soundtrack album is my new album. There are 16 tracks on it. Only six of those songs actually appear in the film. The others are songs that never made the cut. There are probably five more songs I wrote that didn't even make it onto the album. The whole project was constantly in transition. In fact, they're still tweaking it." Adams wrote the love ballad 'Don't Let Go' to underscore the relationship that grows between Spirit and Rain, a mare owned by a young Native American who helps him escape from the army compound. "I recorded the ballad with Sarah McLachlan in Vancouver just shortly before she had her baby [India]. Even that one got cut from the film, but it appears during the end credits. My favourite song, 'Brothers Under the Sun', didn't even make it into the film, but it, too, is under the credits and is featured prominently on the album."

Composer Hans Zimmer said that when he agreed to write the score for Dreamworks' animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, he insisted that producer Jeffrey Katzenberg allowed him to see color footage from the film. "I wasn't going to work on the movie unless I had color because in The Lion King, I did most of the score to the stencil drawings and there are colors that clash between the music and what the animators did. Not because it's all their fault. Nobody notices it but it's like fingers on a blackboard for me. Mr. Bryan Adams came to my rescue on this movie. We realized at a certain point that dialogue wasn't really going to do it in this film because it's the perspective of a horse and we didn't want to do the talking animals thing. We'd done that one. There's only so much I can do instrumentally and ultimately what I needed was a great communicator to come to my rescue and Jeffrey suggested Bryan. It's not just about Bryan as a lyricist but it's just Bryan as a performer. There's a reason people go and see Bryan's shows and it's not just the dancing. He's a great actor and he literally communicated the best that I could find for this. How do we pick [where to have lyrics]? I wrote some music, Bryan wrote some lyrics. Suddenly, so many new opportunities arose of how we could tell the story. So, we just literally started shoving things around. I mean, we had a great love song. We had a love song that Bryan wrote lyrics to five times and it's not in the movie because we could never make it work. On the other hand, the journey to the fort when he first gets captured never had a song, but we had Bryan just do a scratch track one day. We knew that just his voice could tell so much more of the story than instrumental stuff could ever do. It was a discovery all the time." Bryan Adams adds his two cents: "[Writing Spirit's music] became a matter of, don't say what you see, say what you feel. It was like writing a love song without being able to ever use the word love." Says Hans Zimmer: "Well, Jeffrey (Katzenberg) always said to me that this was a huge experiment. I have 87 versions of the opening score, though I guess that pain was mostly self-inflicted. The very first thing I wrote is now at the end of the movie." Before concluding on a positive note: "if you get the notes just right, they're like a laser just honing in on the emotion. You can say a lot more than with dialogue."

Writer John Fusco's original script was full of talking animals, but that the movie eventually dropped the idea. "You start by writing it with full dialogue, and then have [DreamWorks honcho] Jeffrey [Katzenberg] say, 'How about no dialogue?'" Fusco said in an interview. "It's been four and a half years and started off with talking horses and no talking humans. We followed that direction for two years or so, until we had storyboards and sketches to put up and animated sketches with the dialogue working. It was kind of a group feeling that once the horses start talking, it breaks the spell, and we're exploring some more realistic themes of the Old West here and the end of the free West. Maybe we don't need the animals to speak. Maybe we can do it with the voice of Spirit through narration." John Fusco described the tone of his original talking-animal script. "I was partly influenced by Orwell's Animal Farm, and the horses were very representative of different cultures and ideas," Fusco said. "It was darker--a lot of darker shades, and everyone was really excited about that. But it's gone through quite an evolution. Then it became very heavy on narration, which you know now, but Jeffrey asked me to overwrite narration on every scene to really have Spirit tell his story, deliver his perspective on everything. We would use that to inform songs and cut back just to the essence of the narration. But it went from all talking animals to where it is now." For his part, Katzenberg insists that he never intended for the horses to speak. "We wanted to tell a story that was an emotional journey, as opposed to an irreverent comedy," Katzenberg said. "The moment that decision was made that we wanted to tell that kind of a story, as soon as you see a horse... talk, it's Mr. Ed, and it didn't work. We never even tried it, because in our mind it just suddenly made the movie undramatic." Kelly Asbury, who co-directed Spirit, added, "The process of animation is a little hard to explain. We use a script, and the script is very important to the structure of the story and the contents of the scenes. When we storyboard these films, we use the dialogue to help us in the storyboard phase to know what the scene is about. As we slowly develop it, that dialogue comes and goes. We wanted to be visual about it. The dialogue in his script was the jump-off point. I guess that's how to put it."

Anatomy experts Deb Bennett, Director of the Equine Studies Institute; and paleontologist Stuart Sumida, Associate Professor at California State University, San Bernardino, acted as consultants throughout the mammoth animation process, ensuring authenticity in the details. "One of the things that sets this film apart," says Sumida, "is that the studio grounded everyone connected with this project in real horse knowledge. The animators had to learn the nuts and bolts of anatomy, of gait, of why the head is shaped the way it is. They also had to be sensitized to the individual nuances of the horse." Adds Bennett: "Such as learning how one breed differs from another. The animators didn't know that. We brought in actual skeletons for them to move and touch. Touching is very important, especially for artists. Understanding how the joints work is essential to portraying movement correctly."

"Horses are notoriously difficult to draw, and a lot of people know how they look and move, so it's obvious if you make a mistake," says James Baxter, supervising animator of the title stallion. "Trying to create some of the actions in the movie and give them enough power was tricky." Beyond the challenge of drawing horses accurately, the animators had to create a horse who could communicate with the audience through expressions and body language, as the title character doesn't speak. Animators have usually avoided horse characters because the distance between their eyes and mouths makes their expressions hard to read. "It was a real challenge to give Spirit a face that could display readable emotions," Baxter says. "We did some design tricks, shifting his eyes a little further forward on the head, so you can see both eyes more readily, which makes his expressions easier to read. And we gave him nice big eyebrows--which horses don't have."

Jeffrey Katzenberg explained that "In The Call of the Wild, author Jack London told a story through the eyes of an animal. This was a big influence, as was Dances With Wolves. I found it exhilarating, and it gave me the courage to ignore the rules and regulations that say this isn't a practical choice."

Bryan Adams joked that he "used Jeffrey [Katzenberg] as the direct motivation for the rodeo song 'Get Off My Back.' That phrase became my mantra. I was always trying to get Jeffrey off my back. He's a very hands-on kind of guy that Jeffrey." For his part, Katzenberg says Adams "is a bit of a wild stallion himself so you have to rein him in." For Adams, that reining meant "if Jeffrey didn't think a song was right, it was out. No discussion. It doesn't help one's ego to have a song tossed into a bin." Not all the rejects hit the shredding machine. Adams included several on the soundtrack album, which was released earlier this month. "If they ever mount a Broadway version of Spirit, I already have more material than they'd ever need." Adams says when Katzenberg contacted him about the Spirit project, he assumed "I would be attending some kind of casting call for songwriters. I was just pleased they were holding the meetings in London." When he arrived at the hotel to meet with Katzenberg there were no lineups around the block. I asked what was going on and Jeffrey said 'You're it. Do you want to do it or don't you?' Jeffrey said he came to me because he wanted the horse to be like a rocker -- a wild, free spirited soul." Bryan Adams also recalls that Katzenberg originally wanted him "to provide the voice-over narration for the film but eventually, after two tries of different material, I had to bow out of that and they turned it over to Matt Damon. "I'm glad because I never liked the way I sounded on the narration. Maybe one of those tracks will be on the bootleg DVD in Taiwan". One of the songs that never made it into the body of the film is 'Don't Let Go', which Adams eventually recorded with Sarah McLachlan. "That song was written as the love ballad for Spirit and his girlfriend Rain. It's now under the final credits. I thought it was so beautiful that it couldn't miss being in the film but then I'm not the best judge of what songs are going to be hits and which aren't. When I wrote 'Everything I Do' for Robin Hood Prince of Thieves I thought it was a good B-side that's how much I know about hits. Music is my life. It allowed me to run free so maybe that's why I was able to identify with the horse in Spirit."

"He is a partner," director Kelly Asbury says of Jeffrey Katzenberg. "He respects us, and we respect him back. That's why he's been so successful with animation over the years. We care so much, but he cares even more than us. Where we would be satisfied, he wants an extra 5 percent." Katzenberg would make suggestions about the smallest details, he says; in one scene, the producer asked that an eyebrow be cocked a little more. For a film in which the main character doesn't speak, "Those comments were invaluable." And what of Katzenberg's dark side? "He didn't show us his dark side," director Lorna Cook says. "He treats us the way artists wish they could be treated." Canadian rocker Bryan Adams agrees. "He wants it to be great. He phoned me every day just to check in, to see if there's anything I need. It's great to have someone with that kind of enthusiasm. It makes you work harder."

Fully aware that Spider-Man and Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones would be holding onto the coveted young-boy demographic, DreamWorks executives decided they had to go after another, often overlooked group--teenage girls. The studio was "all over this," said Laura Groppe, founder of Girls Intelligence Agency, a girls marketing research group based in Venice. Groppe said executives told her to "go for it, make it a girl movie." So, she contracted to assist DreamWorks with its Spirit publicity. Using the GIA Internet site, GIA began spreading the word about Spirit. The company coordinated screenings and writing contests about horses. Studio co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg even trekked to several events organized by GIA to discuss the movie with hundreds of teenage girls around the nation. But DreamWorks' strategy of targeting girls was something of a gamble in an industry where high box office returns are driven primarily by 14-year-old boys. And it appears the studio itself was somewhat divided over the decision--with some executives (including Katzenberg) arguing that the film appeals as much to young boys as young girls. Studio marketing executives, however, felt they had little choice but to offer Spirit as counter-programming. "When the competing product is Spider-Man and Star Wars, a horse is probably the third choice for a boy. A horse is first choice for a girl," said DreamWorks marketing chief, Terry Press. "Those of us who were at Disney remember The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas, and know that you can have success with girl-driven movies. The trap that you fall into is trying to be all things for everybody these days. This time we decided we are going to speak to our primary audience because they are underserved."

"We started off with talking horses and no talking humans. And we followed that direction for about two years or so." screenwriter Fusco said. In fact, his early drafts of the script included a number of talking animals, including a shaman-like white buffalo and one very wily coyote. "Eventually, it was a group feeling that once the horses started talking it broke the spell. And since we were trying to explore some realistic themes about the old West, we thought maybe we don't need the animals to speak. Maybe we can do it through the voice of a narrator and the character animation of the horses." Animator James Baxter further explains that "the problem is horses are harder to animate than many animals. They're much harder than a dog or a cat because they don't have as many flexible parts to their bodies. We had to boil down and simplify the anatomy into component parts. It's not as if we tried to put in every muscle. But we had to understand where they all were. Spirit's face is probably the most abstract part of him, the most un-horse-like in terms of being accurate."

"The West at that time was a real survival world. And I wanted to show that," screenwriter John Fusco said. "In the early drafts the Colonel was Custer and the idea was that the young Indian would become Crazy Horse. I wanted to portray Custer and the 7th Cavalry as they were at the time, including a scene depicting the Washington River massacre. It was a lot darker, and in the beginning everyone was really excited about that." But as time went by, the tone of the film began to take on a distinctly softer and lighter tone, with many of Fusco's ideas cut out in the process. "I do believe the finished version of the film is more politically correct. Films evolve. They go in different directions. On a film like this you send in the draft of a script, and in four months you get a call to come in and look at the storyboards. That's when you realize the story's gone off in a different direction. You've been working for two years and suddenly you're told, 'Guess what? No talking animals. We're going a different way.' Basically, at that point you can sit there and argue. You can walk out. Or you can say, 'All right, I'm in this and I'm going to stay. I'm going to make the transition and work with it.'" Then laughing, Fusco added, "I don't really think Jeffrey expected me to stay as long as I have. I think the idea was, get John to come in, do a treatment, give us some Western flavor and go. But I started getting excited watching the whole process. “When I look at the finished film I still think that's Custer and that's Crazy Horse; maybe someone else will read that into it, too. But what I really hope is that the film will reach a lot of young people and light a fuse in them to explore the history of the West."

Animation director Don Bluth commented that he "liked the story and the fact that the horses didn't talk. Didn't care for the Art Direction, blue skies, green grass, brown dirt. Pretty ordinary. The dark sequences were the most artistic. Hans Zimmer's score wasn't anything to write home about either. Some of the songs worked well but not a home run. Terrific effort on the animators part to bring it to life. Great opening weekend. So, marketing 'opened' the film, but it doesn't seem to have 'legs.' The audience isn't responding and not telling their friends to go see it. Doesn't look like it will make it to the $100 mil mark. Too much fall-off after the first weekend. Dreamworks hasn't seemed to given up though, we're still seeing advertising support. Should do well in video market, especially with families with young girls."

Jeffrey Katzenberg exulted in his first-ever Oscar nomination in February 2003, as a producer of Spirit. The previous year, colleague Aron Warner got to be the sole name representing the studio under Academy rules when Shrek became the first winner in the new category. "Making Spirit was a huge risk for everybody," Katzenberg said of the film, whose leads don't speak. "It's genuinely thrilling to be nominated."

During a presentation in Tokyo in February 2003, Jeffrey Katzenberg revealed that DreamWorks was readying a Spirit sequel--but this one would be made to head directly to video.