Spirit Untamed – Film Review

After moving to a sleepy little town, young Lucky Prescott (voice of Isabela Merced) befriends a wild mustang named Spirit, who shares her rebellious spirit. When a heartless wrangler plans to capture Spirit and his herd, Lucky and her new friends embark on the adventure of a lifetime to rescue the horse that forever changed her life.

Elaine Bogan‘s Spirit Untamed strives desperately to be a deeply emotional and riveting children’s story about overcoming your biggest fears and thriving in the face of danger and defeat. It certainly had a lot of good intentions and could have been a compelling-enough children’s flick that had some important life lessons to be taken away from it, but sadly, it ultimately ends up being one of the blandest and forgettable animated movies I have seen in a very long time.

Firstly, I had no idea that this was a spin-off film from a 2002 film titled Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron which I have still yet to see, although I have heard that it’s a fairly decent movie with great animation and a heartwarming story. So why is this new spin-off film so bad? And why does the animation here look like it belongs in the 1990s?

Look, I am all for a more simplistic approach to animation, but something about the animation style in Spirit Untamed got on my nerves. Everything looks so lifeless and ironically, without a spirit. Not only do the characters themselves (i.e. Lucky Prescott and Spirit) look extremely generic but the locations and landmarks here have no flair or stylistic distinction either.

Some of the scenery in this movie should have looked absolutely gorgeous – mountaintops, cliff sides, saloons, farms – but disappointingly, virtually none of them did. This is honestly shocking to me considering how this was a DreamWorks Animation project, and as we know from their past works – Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda – they are one of the best animated film studios in history. So the animation looking as bad as it does here is a humongous mystery to me, and one that we are probably never going to get answers to.

The story sadly isn’t anything special either. It’s not torturous to sit through by any means, though. This movie is very easy to sit down and watch with your family or your kids and they might have a great time with it. It’s all very mundane and simplistic, but it’s just far too simplistic. The stakes here don’t feel high whatsoever and the story is one that was stretched far too much. They took a story idea that could have been solved in about ten minutes and stretched it into a feature film. Why? Money.

And this movie is more than likely going to find at least a bit of success on home video I would imagine. The voice cast honestly has some gigantic A-list celebrities on there that are really going to make it sell.

Plus, I must admit, the voice acting here is genuinely good. It’s not brilliant or anything but it is really good. Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold, Sicario: Day of the Soldado) voices the lead protagonist Lucky Prescott and it’s obvious that she had a lot of fun portraying this character. Her voice acting is brimming with charm and enthusiasm and it’s hard not to smile when hearing her act out her lines.

Another one of my favorite voice actors here sadly doesn’t get too much time to shine but it’s Andre Braugher (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Glory) who voices the character of Al Granger. Braugher has easily one of the most distinctive voices in the industry and I recognized him as soon as he said his first lines. He’s an extremely talented actor as we already know, but I never even thought about the fact that he would make for an exceptional voice actor as well. Here’s hoping he gets more projects down the road.

Overall though, Spirit Untamed is just simply one of the most generic and forgettable animated movies I have seen in a long time. Nothing about it is awful and you’re not going to hate yourself for watching it, but you’re probably not going to have a blast either. I wouldn’t say it’s devoid of a spirit, but it certainly isn’t charming or full of adventure.