Two Decades Later, Matt Damon's Animated Western Flop Is A Gem Worth Revisiting

Before Matt Damon brings his Boston accent to ancient Greece in "The Odyssey," it's time to look back at the actor's long career. Though best known for either his action fare in the Bourne movies or dramatic work like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Good Will Hunting," Damon has been involved in a myriad of productions across many genres. Damon's role in the "Ocean's" trilogy shows he's really, really good at comedy, while roles in "Interstellar" and "The Martian" show his skill in populating sci-fi worlds with gravitas and ease.

Likewise, one genre that Damon has been quite underrated in is the Western. The actor has a phenomenal part in Joel and Ethan Coen's "True Grit," playing a Texas Ranger on the hunt for an outlaw. But while "True Grit" gets all the attention, Damon also appeared in another Western, one that was not anywhere near as successful but nevertheless a Western you need to revisit.

The movie is "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron," the 2002 DreamWorks Animation film, the studio's 7th feature. Damon plays a narrator in the film, part of a not extensive but still significant voice over career that also included "Happy Feet," and the criminally underrated sci-fi box office flop "Titan A.E."

"Spirit" is not often considered when ranking the best DreamWorks Animation movies, which is a shame, because this is one of the best movies the studio has ever done, and has only got better with the decades.

The film follows the titular Spirit, a Kiger mustang stallion (which Damon voices) who gets captured by the U.S. cavalry during their genocide of Native Americans. Eventually, Spirit bonds with a rebellious Lakota man, and his mare Rain.

"Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, showcasing how the prestigious festival used to treat animation, particularly DreamWorks animation, in the early 2000s.

Right out of the bat, it is clear "Spirit" is not like other Westerns. Instead, the film is about the freedom of the American frontier and how it was all ripped away by the arrival of the colonizers. Having a wild horse literally named "Spirit" being humiliated, beaten up, and broken by the personification of American colonization of the West, a Cavalry Colonel, becomes a rather poignant and thematically changed image without having to explain to kids what the story thinks of imperialism.

Then there's the lack of dialogue. Where virtually every other animated movie from a big studio about animals would anthropomorphize them and give them witty dialogue (I'm looking at you, Disney's "Home on the Range"), "Spirit" lets its equine heroes just be horses. The only dialogue that comes from Spirit are small inner thoughts narrated by Matt Damon, or the memorable and poignant lyrics of songs performed by Bryan Adams that virtually spell out what's happening in the story and what the characters are going through.

But even if the horses don't talk, they are still quite expressive. For a 2002 movie, "Spirit" has a great blend of 3D and 2D hand-drawn animation, the animators doing meticulous work in ensuring each character acts and emotes clearly, with the facial expressions on Spirit in particular saying more than any of the human characters do with proper dialogue.

Though "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" received positive reviews and even got a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, the film was a disappointment. It didn't help that the film got released in a weekend absolutely dominated by "Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones" and "Spider-Man." The Oscar nomination was great, sure, but unfortunately the film was released the year Hayao Miyazaki easily took home the Best Animated Feature Oscar for the masterpiece that is "Spirited Away" (voted the best animated feature of the 21st century).

But don't feel bad about "Spirit." Even as DreamWorks moved on and eventually went all in on franchises rather than experiment on wildly different sorts of animated features (remember when the studio did "The Prince of Egypt," "The Road to El Dorado," "Chicken Run," and "Shrek" back to back to back?), "Spirit" lived on. Over a decade after the release of the film, "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" came back via a spin-off series, titled "Spirit Riding Free," which released on Netflix in 2017. It followed the offspring of the original Spirit and his adventures at the turn of the 20th century in the frontier with Mexico. Sure, it's virtually a remake of the original film, but with a distinct U.S.-Mexico focus that makes it stand out.

Then, in 2021, nearly 20 years after the first film was released, DreamWorks Animation released "Spirit Untamed," a CG animated movie follow-up to the "Spirit Riding Free" animated series.

"Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" may not have been the smash hit it should have been in 2002, but the film is still remembered today as a unique Western animated movie that Matt Damon did some voice work for.