What also comes with maturity are encounters with unpleasant white men, intent on subjugating the West in general and Spirit in particular. They're epitomized by the Colonel (James Cromwell), who serves as bondage master during Spirit's brief stay with the cavalry. If the white people cause every bit of the trouble in this film, the Native Americans, living as it happens in perfect harmony with the natural world, are just as schematically presented as uniformly virtuous. This is especially true of the young Lakota brave Little Creek (Daniel Studi), who hooks up with Spirit and happens to possess a fetching paint mare named Rain that catches Spirit's eye.

Cross Walt Disney with John Ford and you'd get "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron." Except those two master filmmakers would come up with a far more engaging film than this gorgeous, but otherwise nondescript, horse opera.

"Spirit" is awash in wonder, from Matt Damon's narration to the unwavering nobility of Little Creek and his Native American brothers and sisters. It's a vision of the West that Hollywood has embraced ever since "Dances With Wolves"—a wondrous place until Western Civilization came and did its dirty work.

Not that there's anything wrong with that particular message; man befouling nature has been a theme of animated movies ever since audiences started sobbing at the death of Bambi's mother. But "Spirit" doesn't move that idea along much and lacks the memorable imagery that turns a film into a classic.

I saw "Spirit" over the weekend. It was kind of silly. Sort of "Dances With Wolves" meets "The Horse Whisperer."

Little Creek was very likable, but too good to be true. Naturally, he talked to animals. The Lakota village looked like a Thomas Kinkade painting.

I saw Spirit. It was relatively unobjectionable with some minor criticisms on my part. The movie gets big points from me for not having talking animals—other than the narrative from the point of view of Spirit the horse. I HATE talking animals a la Disney cartoons like Bambi. However the horses were anthropomorphic which I dislike. The indian fellow was identified by name once right away when he came on screen. I remembered that his name was, IMHO, reasonable, or at least not stupid, though I don't remember the exact name. He was supposed to be Lakota. I don't know much about Lakota culture so I don't know how Lakota trained their horses. I would hope they talked to some traditional Lakota about how to portray everyone. The characters, Indian and white were all portrayed as human beings in a surprizingly complex manner for a cartoon. The bad guys weren't entirely evil and the good guys were not perfect, though the native characters came pretty close to perfect, as of course we are ;-) . The raid on the Indian camp was correctly portrayed as unprovoked, but the "battle" was cleaned up for kiddy consumption. I was a little disturbed in that the main Indian character was referred to as a boy, but then he probably was a boy. However, I didn't remember any adult Indian characters, as they weren't developed much, though since the story was about the horse and his Native friend, I guess that's acceptable. On the whole, I thought it was a cute movie on the whole and not particularly offensive.