Spirit Untamed (2021)

DreamWorks has delivered a modest animated Western in which a young Latina protagonist, Fortuna "Lucky" Prescott, befriends a wild mustang, and a Black supporting character, Pru, rides alongside her without anyone in the film feeling compelled to comment on it. Isabela Merced, Marsai Martin, and Eiza González lend their voices. This is diversity by natural attrition, the sort that arrives quietly and asks for nothing. The film deserves credit for it, in the way a restaurant deserves credit for seating everyone without a fuss.

The picture's actual animating conviction is girl power, and it pursues that conviction with more energy than it applies to anything else. Three girls claim the heroic roles in a genre that spent a century handing them to boys and their horses. The director is a woman. The composer, Amie Doherty, became the first woman to score a DreamWorks feature. Reviewers detected a heavy dose of it, and they were not wrong. The West here belongs to the daughters.

What the film declines to do is equally instructive. It contains no queer characters, no reckoning with racial identity, no climate anxiety, no body image discourse, no neurodivergent representation, and no revision of the historical record, given that its frontier is invented outright. The villains are horse wranglers chasing an auction price, and the film frames their trade as cruelty to animals, never as an indictment of the profit motive itself. The lessons about friendship and courage are administered softly, almost apologetically, as if the screenwriters feared being caught instructing anyone. The whole affair lasts eighty-eight minutes and leaves no bruise.