A Brief History of the Animated Horse
Horse Play
In Walt Disney's original Fantasia (1940), during the performance of Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony #6," the viewer is introduced to a mythological countryside wherein plays a bevy of yellow, pink, blue, orange and black baby Pegasus. (We also watch as tiny blue and pink unicorns frolic like dogs, licking the face of a boy.) Above, the majestic white and black Pegasus parents gracefully cut through the clouds, with legs extended forward and backward in a soaring glide. Descending to the lake below, the adult Pegasus move through the water like overgrown swans, with their playful kids entering the water like cannonballs. Soon, the family is joined by an entire herd of winged horses. Following some rainbow puddle splashing fun, the scene culminates with a different set of horses, with manes of fire, drawing the burning chariot of Helios, god of the sun, across the evening sky.
In Disney's Melody Time (1948), a feature-length collection of short films, we see a spectrum of horse development and character. In "Johnny Appleseed," the horses are nondescript and faceless, essentially irrelevant to the story. They are merely beasts of burden helping to carry westward the early pioneering settlers. In "Once Upon a Wintertime," the horses are illustrated as very thin and proper, without any eyes, but only blinders. Again, they are there only to pull carriages and sleighs — though, by story's end, there is a brief heroic moment for the horses in saving a young woman from a waterfall.
More engagingly, in "Pecos Bill," Roy Rogers tells the cowboy folklore of Pecos Bill, with his horse Trigger neighing for him to remember Bill's own cartoonish horse, Widowmaker. Rogers assures Trigger that he wouldn't possibly forget Widowmaker, and indeed he couldn't. Widowmaker — who yodels with big fat lips and toughly hops around — is an integral part of the story, sharing fully in its protagonism. When Bill finds a potential love in sweet Sue, a regular female buckaroo, Widowmaker gets teary-eyed and flustered, and sets out to foil the union. In a comical turn of events, tied down and not wanting to be ridden by Sue, Widowmaker rolls and cartwheels and tries to throw her from the saddle. Sue, unruffled, nonchalantly continues to powder her nose. Eventually, however, the mischievousness of Widowmaker prevails, and his friendship with Bill is left unimpeded.
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by no means an exhaustive survey of the horses of animated films, but merely a brief recapitulation from "then" until "now."
when the writer delves into clever explanations of theoretical biology, and fails to connect the themes to the narrative of the horses. Also, the narrative left out the many animated horses that were not part of feature length films, including entire shows where horses or ponies are central characters.kids with autism
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