In order to educate his animators, Katzenberg arranged for Sumida and Dr. Deb Bennett, another renowned horse expert, to serve as the film's consultants. Then DreamWorks purchased a Kiger mustang stallion named "Donner" to serve as the model for the horse, Spirit. Kiger mustangs are noteworthy because they are a wild breed with genetic traits that can be traced back to the breeds brought over by the Spaniards centuries ago.

This began an intensive crash course in equine anatomy, movement, locomotion and behavior at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, a short drive from DreamWorks' animation campus. Here, the animators spent a great deal of time sketching and videotaping horses, particularly Donner.

Production designer Kathy Altieri (far right) and art directors Luc Desmarchelier (left) and Ron Lukas sketch the unique rock formations of Monument Valley, which served as the site of the cavalry fort in the movie.

"Horses are notoriously difficult to draw, and a lot of people know how they look and move, so it's obvious if you make a mistake," says Baxter. "There were times when someone would animate something that was a little too much like a dog. They would do a bit of action and it would look like a dog playing with something, not a horse."

The other nagging problem was giving the animated horse the power to perform the actions called for in the script such as leaping across a high canyon. "Trying to create some of the actions in the movie and give them enough power was tricky," Baxter states. So, the challenge became how to make the horse look realistic and at the same time animate it. "I tended to simplify and boil down his anatomy into component parts, which would be easily followed by a large group of people and make it so that everyone could draw him satisfactorily and move him around. It's not like we put every single muscle in there, but we had to understand the basics of where they all were."

Much easier said than done. In some cases there are only two or three lines delineating one body part from another. "True," Baxter says, "but you have to know what's there in order to put that line in the right place."

Spirit features a lot of action and dramatic events.

No Mr. Ed Here
Beyond the challenge of drawing horses accurately, the animators had to create a horse who could communicate with the audience through expressions and body language, since none of the animals in the film speak.

This is a point of contention if not controversy. The question is: did Katzenberg intend the horses to be silent from the outset as he claims, or did his team of animators only later realize that Katzenberg's epic Western was in danger of becoming a real joke?