Spirit lived in the American west in an undetermined era of the 19th-century, which means it's only a matter of time before white colonizers come in and wreck shop. Spirit loves his life as a member of a herd of horses, they're all one big family that look out for one another.
So, who exactly is Spirit? Well, he's a horse that speaks only through narration by Matt Damon. It constantly beats you over the head with its intent instead of letting the emotions sweep over you. Nobody's expecting an animated kids movies from DreamWorks to achieve the bleakness of a Robert Bresson movie, but Spirit constantly struggles to achieve effective moments of poignancy because it never allows those moments to be as restrained as they should be. Whereas Bambi committed to its darker tone (oh, did it ever), Spirit has trouble actually letting its more somber elements get executed properly. This was mainly because Spirit was also a tale of relatively non-anthropomorphized animals wandering around in the woodlands with a darker tone. From the get-go, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron struck me as an attempt to do a Western version of Bambi.
