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Features
Equine Majesty
Director Elaine Bogan and her team bring a lot of glorious visuals and artistic horsepower to the new DreamWorks feature Spirit Untamed. By Karen Idelson
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hroughout the years, noble equine companions have been a popular staple of coming of age stories in literature, films and TV shows. One of the most memorable horse heroes of the past two decades made his debut in DreamWorks Animation’s Oscar-nominated feature, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron back in 2002. A spin-off animated series Spirit Riding Free trotted out on Netflix in 2017. This summer, Spirit returns to the big screen in a new feature that follows a young girl’s journey into adulthood. In an important milestone for DreamWorks, Spirit Untamed has three top female creatives in key roles: Karen Foster (producer), Elaine Bogan (director) and Aury Wellington (writer). The film is co-directed by studio veteran Ennio Torresan, Jr. The storyline still includes a wild horse, but this new outing features a young girl named Lucky Prescott who finds a connection to her late mother and her Mexican heritage through horseback riding in the new sleepy town she’s forced to move to. The voice cast includes Isabela Merced as Lucky, Jake Gyllenhaal as Lucky’s father, Julianne Moore as Aunt Cora and Walton Goggins as Hendricks. The bulk of the film’s animation was created all
over the world with individual animators located in Vancouver, Northern California and at Jellyfish Pictures in London. Approximately 50 animators worked on the project at Jellyfish, and the production also used about 70 animators worldwide.
Re-imagining a Horse’s Tale
Foster says the film’s artistic team was keen on preserving and expanding many of the most dynamic parts of the story established in the series. “Because we were reimagining the basic story for
the big screen, we wanted to do honor to the big screen,” says Foster, who was a co-producer on How to Train Your Dragon and also produced several Kung Fu Panda shorts and Scared Shrekless. “We have changed the story somewhat. We wanted to give it a kind of a new re-imagining.” The producer points out that a horse has always represented a certain kind of power for young girls. “It’s like the first romance,” says Foster. “There’s a wildness to it. There’s a freedom that as young women we don’t necessarily get all the
www.animationmagazine.net 12 june|july 21
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