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Staci Layne Wilson

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DreamWorks SKG's latest animated fare, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, gallops into theaters this Memorial Day weekend 2002, but the promotional machine has been in full gear for awhile. The studio hopes that Spirit will be "the" animated feature of the summer season, and they recently treated journalists to a day in a swank Beverly Hills Hotel where we could interview the people behind the pixels and find out more about how the film was made.

In case you're not familiar with the plot, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron follows a horse through his life in the Old West. The unspoken thoughts of the dun-colored hero narrate the story in the voice of Matt Damon and in songs written and produced by Bryan Adams.

At the Junket: Pre-interview Demonstrations.
The great crowd of us are seated before a screen and an easel. The film's co-directors, Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook, talk about the evolution of the plot and why a horse was chosen to tell the story. Unfortunately the model for Spirit (a Kiger Mustang stallion named Donner) isn't there, so we make due with the Foley artists filling in the sounds of his beating hooves and swoosh of his mane and tail. They also do a cool reenactment of the train crash which figures prominently in the movie.

Next up is James Baxter, the lead animator who created Spirit's unique look. He draws a sketch on the easel, and passes a flip-book around. As you turn the pages, you can watch Spirit "gallop" into the foreground. Composer Hans Zimmer also does a demonstration, which turns out to be the most interesting one of all. He plays an action sequence without sound, then runs it with several different musical possibilities, ending up with the one that ended up in the final product.

That's it for demos. Personally, I think they should have had the screenwriter sitting there typing, but maybe that's just me.

The Interviews: Who Showed, Who Didn't
On we go to our designated interview rooms, where 6-10 reporters will sit and interview the talent in round robin fashion.  Donner isn't the only no-show. Matt Damon isn't participating in the press junket, either. Neither are the other voice stars, James Cromwell and Daniel Studi.

However, the singing voice, Canadian pop star Bryan Adams is there. He shares the roundtable spotlight with Zimmer, and they talk about what it was like working together on the lyrics, vocals and music. Adams confesses that he didn't think he was the right person for the job, at first.

I had heard that Adams was originally slated to do all of Spirit's vocals, not just the ones in song. Adams seems a bit miffed. "I got bumped when Matt Damon agreed to do it," he says. "They wanted as much marquee as they could get." But as it turned out, more songs were added than originally planned, so he can't complain (much).

Zimmer adds that his workload increased as dialogue was cut and more music was added to help convey the emotions. "I am the DreamWorks pit pony," he quips. Zimmer says the emotional core of his score was built upon Adams' first lyric to the opening song, I Will Always Return... "Here I am."

Cook and Asbury are also in attendance for interviews. Cook owns a horse (and she doodles one on the scratch pad placed before her), but she doesn't talk much from that perspective. She talks about Jeffrey Katzenberg (the "K" in SKG) and how very inspirational he was, as he was there daily, checking in in a very hands-on way.

When someone asks about the rather fanciful nature of the movie, the directors say the it's not meant to be a "history lesson or a geography lesson" but they did both struggle between authenticity and entertainment. They'd be showing Yosemite one day, the Grand Tetons
the next day. Of course, no horse travels that fast. But they say they looked at John Wayne's film The Searchers and figured it was OK. Theirs is a more fabled West, just like in the classic films of the 40s and 50s.

The directors explain Spirit took several years to complete, from inception to celluloid. Most directors have their next five projects lined up, they note. "An animation director can't do that," Asbury says. "You'll be dead by the time you get to your fifth project."

The hands-on or painterly look of traditional animation instead of the popular CGI that was used in last year's big hits Shrek and Monsters, Inc. was a significant choice, says Asbury. "We wanted to convey on film the same feel that exists in the work of the great Western artists, like Frederic Remington."

Despite being created in a traditional manner (however, it is about 30% CGI), Spirit does break some new ground it is the first animated film ever to be presented in the panoramic Cinemascope.

When Katzenberg enters the room, he shakes hands with everyone and gets the names of those journalists he doesn't already know. Katzenberg then sings the praises of Spirit for awhile, and says he likes the traditional animation mixed with CGI, because "a computer cannot yet do what an artist canyet." He calls it "tra-digital" animation.

Katzenberg is seated next to one of the producers of Spirit, Mireille Soria. Soria also doodles on the scratch pad. Before moving on to another room of journalists, they talk about the business of animation for awhile (it's recently been announced that Disney is closing their West Coast animation department).

An animal anatomy and paleontology expert, Stuart Sumida, Ph.D., was consulted to help the animators get everything just right. Sumida told me in a previous interview, "We'd spend afternoons with horses at the L.A. Equestrian Center putting our studies into practice. We paid particular attention to action, gaits, and even movement of the mouth. Id often have my hands on the horses as they walked about, pointing out the underlying structures'  influence on movement.

"For each wave of artists," Sumida said, "I would first start with the skeleton. It is still the finest place to start to understand structure and function. Then, I'd move to lectures on muscular structure, as well as the skin and hair."

Here at the press junket, Sumida talks more about the skeletons. They looked at actual horse skulls when drawing, he tells us. "Since women don't have a brow ridge," he reveals, "they wanted to make the mare look more feminine in that way, so we used a zebra skull for her facial model." He says it's not perfectly realistic, but "on the balance, I can live with it."

Sumida also reveals that the soft tissues are the hardest to replicate. Like a scene in which a Native American toddler touches Spirit's muzzle and you can see the soft cartilage moving as the horse whuffles; Sumida thinks the animators learned their lessons well, and is especially proud of them for that scene.

Next up is John Fusco, the screenwriter. He rather looks like a horseman, and it turns out, he is. Fusco currently lives on a big horse ranch where he raises Mustangs, but he is originally from Boston and notes that a lot of the great writers who chronicled the Old West came from back East. However, if anyone is qualified to write horse movies, it's Fusco. He learned horsemanship from a Lakota horse master, Grandpa Redbone, and he's friends with respected trainer and author, GaWaNi Ponyboy.

Fusco says Spirit is "a tale of the Old West, as opposed to a Western."

Fusco tells us that he wrote Spirit as a novella first, then as a screenplay. He made the story from a horse's perspective because "the horse was such a key player in the development of the West." Katzenberg had a few ideas and he incorporated them the cavalry officer, the Native American, the railroad sequence which all turned out for the better. "The original story was much, much darker and had more layers," he explains. "It was like Animal Farm not only in that the animals talked, but there were some social undertones about it being the end of an era."

Now that Spirit has hit the proverbial hay, Fusco's next project is Hidalgo, a live action horse movie that Touchstone Pictures will be producing. Set in 1890, it's the true story of a Pony Express courier who travels to Saudi Arabia to compete with his horse, Hidalgo, in a dangerous race with participants from all over the world.

When James Baxter takes the hotseat, he's almost instantly bombarded with questions about why the horses in Spirit don't look more realistic. Someone especially didn't like how the horse's eyes had encircling whites, like human eyes. "We tried realistic horse's eyes," he explains, "but it didn't work." Baxter goes on to say, "The fairy tale quality would have been lost, had we tried to go for photorealism."

Having had the chance to study Donner in the flesh "helped immensely," Baxter adds, as he'd never drawn a horse as a lead character before. Scenes in which great emotion was conveyed were especially challenging, he confesses. "Horses don't have speech to emphasize points; they don't have hands to gesture with; they don't even have shoulders to shrug."

Talk turns to Disney's shutting down of their animation department, but Baxter says he still has hope for the medium. However, just to hedge his bets, he's going to start training soon for 3-D animation.

The long day of interviews winds down. As we vacate the room, one of the journalists takes the doodle pad Katezenberg and the rest have scribbled on. I never think like that; maybe I should hedge my own bets and open an account at eBay when I get home.

Copyright ©2002 Staci Layne Wilson.  All Rights Reserved.
Reproduction in any form not permitted.