the times | Thursday December 3 2020 1GT 9
arts
DISNEY; BARNEY COKELISSHorses on screen
by Kevin Maher
Champion the Wonder Horse
(1955-56)
After rising to fame in
the 1940s as the equine
sidekick of the singing movie
cowboy Gene Autry, below,
Champion the Wonder
Horse was eventually, in 1955,
granted his own TV series. By
then he was too old to meet
the weekly demands of an
action-packed drama serial
and had to be replaced by a
British born-and-raised
gelding who was named TV
Champ. The series, which ran
for two seasons, also featured
several replacement horses
to do the stunts, while TV
Champ was mainly required
for close-ups, reaction shots
and vanity work.Dances with Wolves (1990)
Cisco is the name of the
no-nonsense, rider-bucking,
fiercely loyal horse belonging
to Lieutenant John J Dunbar
(Kevin Costner) in this
Oscar-winning western epic.
Dunbar commandeers Cisco
in the opening battle, and
they begin a lifelong
bromance,
accompanying
each other to
a deserted
outpost in
South Dakota,
where Dunbar
befriends
his Sioux
neighbours
and Cisco
repeatedly foils
horse-napping
attempts (see
“rider-bucking”).
Typically, it ends badly
for Cisco, who is shot to
pieces by racist Yankees who
mistake Dunbar for an
“injun” when in fact he’s only
expressing his true Sioux self.Spirit: Stallion of the
Cimarron (2002)
Matt Damon’s most action-
packed role is not Jason
Bourne, but Spirit, the wild
American mustang who
refuses to be ridden. That’s
his central motivation as he
pings between Lakota
warriors, US army colonels
and vicious railway workers
on a rip-roaring rollercoaster
that charts the slow and
inevitable destruction of
Native American homelands
by ruthless European
invaders. Luckily, however,
Spirit helps the Lakota to
reclaim their nobility, andattle, and
long).
s badly
s shot to
Yankees who
rforan
Lean on Pete (2018)
The eponymous ageing
“quarter horse” (good at
short sprints, not much else)
in this tough-love road movie
becomes a father figure, a
confidant and a metaphorical
soul for the teenage hero
Charley Thompson (Charlie
Plummer). Originally
scheduled for an appointment
with the glue factory, Lean
on Pete is saved by our newly
orphaned protagonist, who is
unable to bear any more loss.
The pair travel across
America, west to east, in
search of long-lost relatives
for Charley, but during their
journey they bond at a soul
level. Alas, it doesn’t end well
for the old boy.eventually he returns to his
own untouched and unspoilt
American wilderness.War Horse (2011)
The owl whistle scene. That’s
all you need. That’s the
movie. It’s 1918, and after the
second battle of the Somme,
hero soldier Albert (Jeremy
Irvine) is blind and his
beloved horse Joey long
since presumed dead. Joey,
however, has survived, barely,
and is about to be executed
by army doctor Sergeant Fry
(Eddie Marsan) when Albert,
far down the ranks, makes
his trademark owl call. Joey’s
head suddenly springs up.
He listens. Albert calls again.
The soldiers part, and a clean
line slowly opens between
Joey and Albert. They
tenderly reunite. “Hello,
Joey, where you been, eh?”
Albert whispers, rubbing
and scratching Joey with
delight. The audience is
in floods. Job done.The “autobiographical” voiceover is
done by Kate Winslet. She does a
good, if rather overdramaticised job
in an adaptation that has been heavily
feminised, presumably to appeal to the
pony-mad-girl-before-she-moves-on-
to-boys market.
Mostly, this film feels like The
Horse Whisperer meets Black Stallion
with maybe a dash of National Velvet
thrown in. A plot, controlled by a
steadily unpaying lunge line of
clichés, is put through its paces.
It’s pretty sentimental. Wary of
offending (where Sewell can be
startlingly frank), it pulls its punches.
Suffice to say (for those who know
the story), neither me nor my
daughter shed a tear in Ginger’s
infamous last scene.
Yet the scriptwriters do at least bear
in mind Sewell’s primary intention.
They also update her anti-cruelty
message to our era. Instead of a
carriage-driving aristocrat who putsanimal suffering — and the
connection between the two — set
out to convince a Victorian society
for which the horse was often nothing
more than a means of transport that
these were sentient creatures and
therefore should be treated kindly.
Black Beauty was far more than some
sentimentalised fable for children. It
wasn’t even originally intended for
children. It was a clarion call to action.
It had an undeniable impact in
terms of animal welfare. Sewell’s
descriptions of the suffering caused,
for instance, by the bearing rein
(a strap that forced a horse to hold
its neck in an arch to make it look
flashier) stirred up such outrage that
it led to a ban. Yet in an era when
horse ownership has become a
privileged luxury, can Black Beauty
still be relevant?
This new Disney version is
emphatically an update, a sort of
autobiography in that the horse tells
its life story in the first person. If you
want the version that’s most true to
the original, I would go for the 1994
one in which Alan Cumming does the
voiceover for the black gelding.
In the year that marks the
bicentenary of Sewell’s birth, the
Disney scriptwriters have given Black
Beauty (the only book that she wrote)
a complete modern overhaul. The
story is now set in modern-day
America (although it was filmed in
South Africa). Joe Green, the erstwhile
stable lad, is a girl called Jo.
The dark-haired beauty Mackenzie
Foy (you might recognise her from
The Twilight Saga) plays an orphaned
teenager who, sent reluctantly to live
on a ranch, encounters a wild
mustang, played by another dark-
haired beauty — or rather, as the
sharp-eyed will notice, a succession
of them (the equine star even changes
breed once or twice).
And Black Beauty has been gender-
reassigned too, from male to female.
society fashion above animal
welfare, we meet a rich-bitch mother
with a showjumping brat. A draw
rein (a controversial piece of kit
that can put a horse under pressure)
is presented as today’s equivalent
of the bearing rein. The beaten-
down cab horse finds its modern
incarnation in those dismal hacks
that haul “fairytale” carriages around
today’s tourist hotspots.
In the end Sewell was delivering
a fundamentally tough lecture about
the enslavement of living beings;
imbalance of power and the brutality
that it can bring; and the moral
imperative to show more compassion.
This is a message we still need
to hear. We may glibly describe
ourselves as a nation of animal
lovers, but cows, pigs and chickens
are routinely reared in the sort
of conditions that, if a horse were
subjected to them, would cause
public outrage.
Is part of that problem the fairytale
version of farm life so routinely
conveyed to our children? Moo
goes the cow in Farmer Corncob’s
lush pasture. Oink goes the pig that
wallows in the mud. Cluck goes the
hen as she broods on her nest of
fresh straw. Children’s literature does
not show us those chain gangs of
miserable Friesians, plodding the
treadmills of their lives in the dairy.
We don’t read about the mad
boredom of pigs that spend their lives
in a prison. We protect our children
from the facts of the industrialised
farming that puts the food on their
plates. The truths are unpalatable,
but if we don’t face up to them, how
can they ever be rectified?
We don’t need a watered-down
version of Black Beauty’s impassioned
message. We need more children’s
authors with the courage and
conviction — and profound
compassion — of Anna Sewell.
Black Beauty is on Disney+w w r t i o d i t t a t
Top: Mackenzie Foy as Jo in the new
series. Above: Mark Lester as Joe
in the 1971 film. Above left: Rachel
Campbell-JohnstonIn the new
version,
stable lad
Joe Green
is a girl
called Jo
- b, 15 per cent
- c, 60 per cent
- d, 28 per cent
- b, 50 per cent
- a, 4.4 billion
- c, 3,
- d, 91.2 per cent
- c, more than
160 million - d, nurses
- b, 2h 53 min
- d, 36 min
- d, 750 million
- c, 96 years ago
- c, 60 per cent
- a, 89 per cent
- a, 12 per cent
- d, 15 per cent
- c, 96 per cent
- d, 65 per cent
- a, 85 per cent
Answers: