For his part, Katzenberg insists that he never intended for the horses to speak. "We wanted to tell a story that was an emotional journey, as opposed to an irreverent comedy," Katzenberg explains. "The moment that decision was made that we wanted to tell that kind of a story, as soon as you see a horse talk, it's Mr. Ed, and it didn't work. We never even tried it because in our mind it just suddenly made the movie undramatic."

Eyebrows and large, visible eyes were key to making Spirit's emotions clear to the viewer.

According to screenwriter, John Fusco, however, he was two years into a script, which had all the animals talking before he was asked to write voice-over narration instead. "We started out with all dialogue, and then having Jeffrey [Katzenberg] say, 'How about no dialogue?'"

Frustrating? "It's been four and a half years and started off with talking horses and no talking humans," Fusco says. "We followed that direction for two years or so until we had storyboards and sketches to put up and animated sketches with the dialogue working. It was kind of a group feeling that once the horses start talking, it breaks the spell, and we're exploring some more realistic themes of the Old West."

Was it a committee decision in the end or had Katzenberg conceived the project from "day one," as he says with no talking horses?

James Baxter, who was specifically responsible for animating Spirit, the lead character, tries to give some insight as to why there may have been a discrepancy between what Katzenberg claims and what screenwriter Fusco first wrote. "It's very difficult to write a screenplay where nobody talks. It's like writing a short story. For a screenwriter that is incredibly difficult to do. So, I think even at that early stage, they [the co-producers and co-directors] knew that wasn't right [animal dialogue], but they had to go through that process to get the storyboard together."

Kelly Asbury (left) and Lorna Cook.

Kelly Asbury, who co-directed Spirit along with 25-year veteran animator, Lorna Cook, adds, "The process of animation is a little hard to explain. We use a script, and the script is very important to the structure of the story and the contents of the scenes. When we storyboard these films, we use the dialogue to help us in the storyboard phase to know what the scene is about. As we slowly develop it, that dialogue comes and goes. The dialogue in his [Fusco's] script was the jump-off point. I guess that's how to put it. We even had a lot more narration at one point, but it started going away, too. We wanted to be visual about it."

"Jeffrey [Katzenberg] asked me to overwrite narration on every scene, to really have Spirit tell his story and deliver his perspective on everything. We would use that to inform songs," says Fusco. "That's something Jeffrey always wanted to do -- to have a musical narrative going on -- and cut back just to the essence of the narration. But it evolves. These artists are working in one direction for two years, and then guess what? No talking animals. We're going this way."