Animators have been horsing around with equine characters for quite some time. In fact, horses have been one of the staple (or rather, stable) characters figured in a great many animated films, with varying degrees of prominence and personality. There will probably be some neigh-sayers regarding the movies we have chosen or forgotten to highlight here, but perhaps you can forgive us as we pass over My Little Pony, or Gumby's pony pal, Pokey, too. Saddling ourselves to some of the well-known features of North America, we glance back over the shoulder of animation history in this nostalgic review of the animated horses of yesteryear.

The earliest known photo, circa 1825, is a reproduction of a 17th century Dutch engraving. Courtesy of France's National Library.

Hold Your Horses
We begin with a historical aside. Interestingly enough, the earliest known photographic image happens to be of ... that's right, a horse! More specifically, the photo, by French chemist Joseph Nicephore Niépce, circa 1825, is the heliographic reproduction of a 17th century Dutch engraving. (Heliography is a technique where light is used to project an image on to a photo-sensitive surface.) The historic photo recently sold to France's National Library for $443,000.

Moving forward to the 1870s, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was hired by former California governor Leland Stanford to settle the controversy of whether a trotting horse had all four feet off the ground at any point in time. (Answer: yes.) Muybridge cleverly set up a line of cameras with mechanically tripped shutters, thereby capturing the individual moments of a horse's run. In lecturing around the United States and Europe, Muybridge made use of the zoopraxiscope, a primitive motion-picture machine he had developed to project images in rapid succession. His famous work detailing animal locomotion, containing over 100,000 photographs, was published in 1887, and is still used as reference today.

Eadweard Muybridge's galloping horse, 1878. © Dover Publications.

Fifty years hence, with animated films in full swing, horses would come to fall into one of a few categories of animated beast. In most stories, the horses will serve a very peripheral role, as background characters, almost as props; in other stories, horses will assume a greater and meaningful presence, becoming more stylized; until, lastly, horses hoof their way to the forefront of the action, becoming central characters with inclinations and personalities all their own.

Salvador Dali's conception of a horse. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

Evolution implies change, not necessarily progress. In cartoon terms, we are often fortunate to see both. Over the years, in addition to their increasing narrative relevance and emotional intelligence, one might also contend that a stronger aesthetic design has been adapted to the animated horse. (It is important to note that not all evolutionary lines pan out. Some, of course, peter out. In corralling together his own ideas for a surreally imagined animated horse, Salvador Dali's development work for a Disney film was ultimately reigned in, never to see the light of screen.)

The following is by no means an exhaustive survey of the horses of animated films, but merely a brief recapitulation from "then" until "now."