text: Believe me, I wanted to like "Spirit". The idiotic comments people made at the time of its release about how quaint it was to see old-fashioned, hand-drawn animation again, as if the last pencil-animated cartoon had been released twenty years ago, and the even more idiotic comments about how computers had now made the old techniques obsolete, had got my blood up ... but then, the insulting, flavourless banality I had to endure in the first ten minutes of "Spirit" got my blood up even more.<br /><br />The character designs are generic, the animation (partly as a result) merely competent, the art direction as a whole so utterly, boringly lacklustre that you wonder how it could have come about (we know, from "The Prince of Egypt" and "The Road to El-Dorado", that there are talented artists at Dreamworks), and the sophisticated use of CGI is in every single instance ill-judged. (Why do they bother?) There's not a single thing worth LOOKING at. In an animated cartoon, this is fatal.<br /><br />But it gets worse...<br /><br />The horses can't talk, but they're far more anthropomorphised and unconvincing than the deer in "Bambi", which can. And it seems that, in a way, the horses CAN talk. Spirit himself delivers the prologue (sounding for all the world like a 21st-Century actor picked out of a shopping mall in California), and from then on his laid-back, decidedly unhorselike narration is scarcely absent from the soundtrack, although it never once tells us anything that we didn't already know, or expresses a feeling which the artwork, poor though it is, wasn't capable of expressing twice as well. That prologue, by the way: (a) contains information which Spirit, we later discover, had know way of knowing; (b) expresses ideas which Spirit would lack the power to express even if he COULD talk; (c) includes new age rubbish like, "This story may not be true, but it's what I remember"; and (d) will give countless children (the production is pitched, I presume, at six-year-olds) the impression that horses are native to North America, which is sort of true, in that the common ancestor of domestic horses, zebras etc. WAS native to North America - but all horse species on the continent had gone extinct long before the first humans arrived, and the mustangs of Spirit's herd (which allegedly "belong here like the buffalo grass") were descended from horses introduced by Europeans.<br /><br />So the prologue rather annoyed me.<br /><br />As often as Spirit talks, Bryan Adams sings, sounding as usual as though he's got a bad throat infection - and it's not THAT he sings or even HOW he sings, it's WHAT he sings: maudlin narrative ballads which contribute even less, if possible, than Spirit's spoken narrative, and which sound as though they all have exactly the same tune (although I was paying close attention, and was able to discern that they probably didn't). If only Bryan Adams and the guy-pretending-to-be-a-horse could have SHUT UP for a minute or two, the movie might have been allowed to take its true form: mediocre and derivative, rather than jaw-droppingly bad.