Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
2002 · Kelly Asbury · Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron on Sightlines
A rope pulls tight and a horse's head comes up.
He is standing in a corral at the cavalry fort, fence rails slicing the frame into flat horizontals, and he says nothing, because nothing with four legs in this movie ever says anything. What you get is a neck, two ears, an eye, and about half a second of stillness before he decides to fight the rope.
Everything the film knows how to do is in that half second.
Gilles Deleuze starts his two books on cinema with an idea he borrows from Bergson: a living creature is a gap. Movement arrives at it; movement leaves it; in between there is a hesitation where the response gets chosen. Deleuze calls a creature like that a centre of indetermination, an interval. Most movies fill the interval with talk. Somebody says what they are weighing, and the gap closes before you can see it. Spirit cannot do that. Asbury and Cook took away their protagonist's ability to explain himself and then had to build ninety minutes out of what remained: weight shifts, ear angles, the pause before the buck. The interval stops being a philosopher's point and becomes the thing you are actually watching, shot after shot.
Bergson's other claim, the one Deleuze builds the whole movement-image on, is that film does not give you poses. It samples motion at equidistant instants, none of them the decisive one. Deleuze's phrase is the any-instant-whatever: the ordinary instant, the one between the postcard moments. Drawn animation is that principle in its purest state, because no camera recorded the gallop at all. Somebody built it, one equidistant drawing at a time. Which is exactly why the production brought live horses onto the lot for the animators to study and draw. No lens was ever pointed at this animal, so the film forfeits the guarantee André Bazin thought photography handed cinema, that something was really there. The credibility has to be re-earned inside the line instead: musculature, weight transfer, the instant a canter breaks into a run. What Spirit buys is not a realism of things. It is a realism of gait.
On that foundation the film runs the action-image at full power, and specifically what Deleuze calls its large form: a huge situation bears down on a character until one decisive act changes it. The situation here is an encompasser, a milieu that calls the action out of the hero. Deleuze's word is synsign, and Spirit's is the range itself, the buttes and enormous skies and silhouetted riders lifted straight from the Ford Western. Against that: the binomial, force meeting force. Spirit and the Colonel circle each other in a wary choreography that never becomes a conversation, and behind the Colonel stands the railroad, drawn by the production design as the intrusion of the machine into the animal's world. The corral and the harness mark him. He marks them back. Deleuze calls that mutual denting the imprint, the bond by which a situation and a body write on each other.
The cutting has a shape Deleuze named for the Western: respiration. The film breathes in on vast milieu, out on the taut line of the action. Long lyrical passages cut to music, then the tight kinetic set pieces, the breaking yard, the train running loose, the leap across the canyon. That alternation is not decoration. It is the structure.
And it governs the framing. Put the horse against open land and you get the Open, Deleuze's sense that the frame gives onto a whole that is still changing. Put him behind rails, ropes, fences, fort walls, and the same landscape becomes out-of-field, present as the thing that is missing. The bars are legible because of what they are cropping out.
Then the face. The animators' stated brief was to keep the body anatomically honest while stylising the face just far enough to read, and no further into cartoon. That brief is, precisely, the problem of the affection-image: the close-up carrying a feeling that has registered but has not yet discharged into action. The finest version of it applies here. Deleuze's potisign is the face of building intensity, micro-movement accumulating toward a threshold, and a drawn face can do this with a control no photographed one allows, because every increment on the way to the threshold was chosen by hand. The acting is in the drawing. That is not a figure of speech about this film, it is the job description.
Which leaves the songs, the part most likely to be dismissed as 2002 soundtrack product. Deleuze has a better account. In the musical, he says, the dancer stops being the source of movement and the world starts moving instead: movement of world. The individual is carried rather than propelling. That is exactly what the Bryan Adams numbers do. For three minutes Spirit is not acting on anything, he is being borne through country, and the score and the montage supply the motion he has stopped generating. The first-person lyric gives him a singing voice he never has in speech. This is why the songs do not feel like interruptions, and why the film sits closer to ballet than to the talk-driven animated comedy that owned its release window.
The specific invention is a calibration: Matt Damon's narration is rationed to a thread, used to bridge, never to substitute, so the drawn performance is never let off the hook. It would have been so easy to let the horse talk.
There is one more thing, and it is almost too neat. The tradigital pipeline draws the animals by hand and builds the locomotive, the fort and the sweeping canyon camera in the computer. The film's whole argument, living body against machine, is embedded in how the film was manufactured. Then history settled it. DreamWorks made one more principally hand-drawn feature and stopped.
The inheritance is unusually easy to itemise. From The Searchers, the Monument Valley framing grammar and the captivity-and-return armature, with the landscape treated as moral ground; the film keeps the shape and reassigns the roles, so the captor is the cavalry. From Bambi, the studio habit of studying live animals as actors, and animal-POV drama built on gesture instead of speech. From Fantasia, the long sequence cut and staged entirely to score. From The Black Stallion, the wordless horse-and-landscape passage that carries story on movement alone. From Black Beauty, the first-person equine voice and the episodic run of confinements. From Dances with Wolves, by way of Fusco, the Native-sympathetic revisionist frame.
What it passed forward is not a style, since the technique it was made in had two years left. It is a proof: a feature can hold a mute animal lead for its whole length without cheating, if the drawing is good enough and the score does the confessing. Its audience found that out slowly, and kept it.
Watch it again for the intervals. Not the leap. The half-seconds before he moves.
Concepts in play
- the interval (centre of indetermination) — Dialogue is withheld from the animal leads, so meaning is built through blocking, gesture and the pause before action; the narration is deliberately limited so it supplements rather than replaces the visual performance.
- any-instant-whatever — Hand-drawn character animation reconstitutes equine motion from equidistant drawings rather than photographing it; the production brought live horses into the studio so animators could render musculature and locomotion convincingly.
- action-image, large form — A global situation (cavalry capture, the breaking yard, forced labour on the railroad) presses on the stallion until decisive acts — the escapes, the climactic canyon leap — transform it and return him to the herd.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Wide vistas, buttes and canyons, silhouetted riders against enormous skies in the Ford/Monument Valley grammar; production design organises the world into open range versus cavalry fort so the milieu itself calls the action out.
- binomial (force against force) — The wary choreography between Spirit and the Colonel, staged without shared language, and the wider opposition of the natural against the mechanical with the railroad as industrial intrusion.
- imprint (empreinte) — The series of confinements — breaking yard, ropes, harness, railroad labour — marks the horse's body, while his resistance reshapes the Colonel's relation to him.
- respiration-space — The editing alternates lyrical, music-led montage across vast landscape with tightly cut action set pieces (the breaking yard, the train runaway, the canyon leap).
- the Open — Compositional grammar frames the horse against open landscape and enormous sunset skies to dramatize freedom, giving onto a whole larger than the frame.
- out-of-field (relative) — Framing the horse against bars, ropes, fences and enclosing fort architecture keeps the withheld open range present as the adjacent space being cropped away.
- affection-image — The production's core technical problem: stylising the horses' faces just enough to read human-legible emotion without lapsing into cartoon anthropomorphism, while keeping the body anatomically real — feeling registered in the face before it discharges into action.
- icon of power (potisign) — With no speech available, intensity is built by micro-movement across the drawn face and body in the resistance sequences; the film is discussed as an animator's picture for the quality of its equine acting.
- movement of world — The Bryan Adams songs, frequently first-person, carry extended montage passages in which the horse stops driving the action and is borne through the landscape by score and cutting, lending him a singing voice he never uses in dialogue.