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JEFFREY KATZENBERG:
“I’ve always wanted to animate horses. There’s always been a special connection between humans and horses. There’s something that happens when you look and see the beauty, the nobility, the power of a horse. It’s a beautiful creature. When we started this film four years ago, there had not been an animated movie told from the eyes of a four-legged creature since The Lion King.”
JAMES BAXTER:
“All the animators had to research how a horse is put together in such detail that we could be free. We had to get through the science so that we could do the art. Dreamworks owned a horse during the production that we used as a model for Spirit. Now he’s on a ranch in central California living a great life.”
KELLY ASBURY:
“Directing an animated film is like being a shepherd, and you have 400 really talented, opinioned sheep!”
LORNA COOK:
“We actually did board several sequences with Spirit and different (animals) talking, and it just seemed to lose its viability and its real sense of drama and sincerity, and it became comical in a way. The dignity of those horses is something very wonderful and we wanted to preserve it.”
KELLY ASBURY:
“I heard a joke recently … a horse goes into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’ A horse has eyes up here and a mouth down here and the minute we made it talk it was pushing it too far and it was not believable. We didn’t want wall-to-wall dialogue or wall-to-wall narration. We wanted something that was told visually and the only time we have dialogue is to enhance the story in some way.”
BRYAN ADAMS:
“Basically, what we were trying to create was a musical, with the songs expressing the emotions of a horse. But the story was completed before the music, so the songs had to be very specific, which was exceptionally challenging for me as a songwriter. As a singer, my role was being a storyteller, trying to bring Spirit’s emotions to life through my voice.”
JAMES BAXTER:
“We melded 2D and CG together so that we could pull off some cool effects in Spirit. To meld them together I had to draw like a computer, very, very accurately because the nature of computer animation is you’re moving a computer model in digital space. In essence, that is already a very accurate representation of something from every angle. So I had to do it by hand, draw something from every conceivable angle accurately so that I could (flawlessly) cut right next to a computer piece of animation. The movie is about 15% computer animated.”
LORNA COOK:
“In regard to the 2D animation of the characters – to me it seemed like there was a true connection and warmth that I don’t know if the CG could capture. I would like to see the 2D medium remain, there’s just nothing that can compare to a hand drawn sequence.”
KELLY ASBURY:
“If there was anything we tried to achieve with the CG/2D combi
nation, it was for the technology to be invisible and hard to spot.”
JEFFREY KATZENBERG:
“I think some of the best animated movies ever made are the ones that were fables, meaning through the eyes of animals as opposed to allegories, through the eyes of people.”
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THE CONCEPT:
