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How to watch Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
2002 · Kelly Asbury · Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Spirit's ears and weight shift before he moves. (performance)
The horses never speak, so animators build feeling entirely from posture, ear angles, and the pause before an action, the hesitation before the buck or the bolt.
Payoff: That half second before he decides is where the whole performance lives, since no horse in this film ever gets to explain itself in words. In the reading: the interval (centre of indetermination). Deleuze calls that hesitation before a response a centre of indetermination, and the film builds its whole performance out of it.
Listen for the songs speaking in Spirit's own voice. (sound)
Hans Zimmer's score and Bryan Adams's first-person songs carry the feeling Spirit cannot say out loud, giving a silent horse something like a singing voice.
Payoff: The songs are not a break from the story. They are the only place this mute character gets to speak in his own words.
Notice how the film frames the horse against open land or fences. (staging)
Spirit is composed against huge open vistas to show freedom, then against corral rails, ropes, and fort walls to show captivity. The two kinds of space keep trading places.
Payoff: You can read exactly how free or trapped Spirit is at any moment just from what kind of space the frame puts him in. In the reading: the Open. Deleuze calls open landscape a frame giving onto a changing whole, the Open, and fences turn that same land into what is missing.
Notice the editing switch between slow songs and fast chases. (cutting)
The film alternates lyrical, music-led passages with tightly cut action sequences, the breaking yard, the runaway train, breathing out to vast open land and in to tense pursuit.
Payoff: Since nobody talks, the rhythm of the cutting itself has to carry the story forward instead of dialogue.
Watch the camera sweep and track alongside the running horse. (camera)
CGI lets the camera crane and run beside Spirit during the chases, something hand drawn animation alone could not easily do, while the character stays fully hand drawn.
Payoff: The horse is drawn by hand and the world around him is built by computer, and you can feel both technologies working at once.
Once you have seen it
Notice the single leap that resolves the whole standoff. (structure)
Everything in the film, the range, the fort, the railroad, builds toward one decisive act at the canyon, a single leap that changes Spirit's entire situation at once.
Payoff: One huge situation presses down on him until a single action answers it completely, the oldest shape a Western can take. In the reading: action-image, large form. Deleuze calls this the large form action-image: a whole situation pressing on a hero until one decisive act resolves it.
Watch Spirit and the Colonel circle each other without touching. (staging)
Their scenes together are staged as a wary standoff, two wills measuring each other, never quite a fight and never a truce either.
Payoff: Neither one wins the other over. The film stages their whole relationship as force meeting force, not persuasion.
Watch Spirit's face build toward a decision in close-up. (performance)
The animators kept Spirit's face just expressive enough to read without turning cartoonish, so a close-up can hold and build a feeling before it turns into an action.
Payoff: Every increment of that expression was drawn by hand, choice by choice, which is a kind of acting no camera could capture.
Carry this in: Watch the half second before Spirit moves. The whole film's acting happens in that pause, not the action after it.