Spirit Untamed (2021)
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Spirit Untamed Movie Review
Spirit Untamed is a 2021 animated family adventure film directed by Elaine Bogan. This movie is one of DreamWorks Animation’s cheapest and blandest efforts.
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“Proper ladies do not hang out window ledges“
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Lucky Prescott’s life is changed forever when she moves from her home in the city to a small frontier town and befriends a wild mustang named Spirit. This movie was obviously just a plug for their new show, which is still strange as that series has been going on for four years now, but only now is the feature movie released. I’d expected it to be an interesting prequel to ‘Spirit: Stallion the Cimarron’ as I absolutely love that underrated flick, but unfortunately the movie ended up being its own beast altogether, and mostly for the worse.
There is a twofold problem with this movie’s title. The former word indicates that it is going to be a movie about Spirit, but it’s simply never a film about him as he is saddled with a supporting, less interesting role. The latter word would indicate that the movie is wild and adventurous, but it’s only sporadically as fun and as, no pun intended, spirited. Most of it is just overly slow and unexciting for such a titled movie about horses.
This is Lucky’s story first and foremost. She gets most to do and she is the main protagonist. Though the movie is typical in its feminist trappings in portraying a young, daring girl who is into more than just the regular girly stuff, the character still worked as she’s well developed and quite likable throughout.
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Her father and her aunt are fine, but they needed more screen time. As for her many girl friends, they are individually forgettable, but together they would definitely make any girl watching this movie happy as they literally have parties in the desert in a typical young girl pajama party fashion. The movie is, thus, very limited in its appeal for adult viewers, but young girls would undoubtedly find it amazing. And it’s rare for DreamWorks to make a full-on movie for girls, so I am happy that they did it for that audience.
Spirit Untamed is less memorable in the horse elements. I expected much more in this department, but what we got was sorely lacking. Yes, we got to see some different horses and at least some care is taken into the breeds and the lifestyle of a horse enthusiast, but for the most part the movie is focused just on the girls alone. Spirit is wonderful per usual, but he needed much more to do. The plot point that they added later down the line with the horse wranglers was okay and at least somewhat suspenseful, but the film needed more of these adventurous and dangerous scenarios for the more mature audiences.
The movie is weakly paced as it’s way too slow and uninvolving. The voice cast did a good job and the fact that these are all Latinos was interesting and different for DreamWorks. As for the animation, it is obviously too cheap, being made with a very low budget, but unlike their previous such effort, ‘Captain Underpants’, this one looks very unappealing and rough. The messages and themes for kids are great and the movie is sweet, but it needed better dialogue and a more original plot.
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