Asbury's co-director, Lorna Cook, adds, "I think we were looking to do something that had some sophistication. To give a creature like a horse the kind of dignity that it needed to have, [no animal dialogue] was a very natural decision."

Fusco, whose credits include Young Guns, Young Guns II, The Babe and Thunderheart, all live-action features, says that he began with a few pages of notes from Katzenberg, which pointed him in an Animal Farm direction. "I think that's how Jeffrey saw it up front and then we sort of went through the discovery process together. I wrote a short novel. It started as a treatment and then it went off and off. Then Jeffrey said, 'Go wild! Do what you want.' I wrote some songs. I don't know if he ever appreciated that. I turned it in and he was really excited. He said, 'Now you've got my mind working.'"

In what way, was Fusco's original script like Orwell's Animal Farm? "The horses were very representative of different cultures and ideas in the West. The buffalo had their story, the cavalry horses had theirs. It was darker -- a lot of darker shades, and everyone was really excited about that."

Getting Spirit Onto The Screen
After two years of storyboarding talking animals, Katzenberg's no talking animals dictum had little effect on the animators. "Pantomime characters have always been a part of animation," James Baxter states. "For example, Dumbo doesn't talk. So, it's nothing new in those terms. It's the same as any actor having to do a mute character. You use your body language and the rest of it. All we did this time was to do that through a horse's body."

The baby colt Spirit is protected by his mother.

"I think that's really something we tried to discover in the boarding process," explains Lorna Cook of capturing human pathos and drama through the horses' bodies. "That's where we could create the movie first. And create a kind of visual blue print for the film before we actually started animating it. So a lot of the business, a lot of the way Spirit or the other characters acted or behaved was found by boarding out the sequences and having them very specific. That served as a guide for the animators, and then the animators were able to take it way, way beyond. But we talked about his personality a great deal, and we watched the horse [Donner] that was the model for this film and tried to pick up nuances and little behavioral things that would make the character more rich."

"There are a lot of human emotions coming through a horse's body," James Baxter adds. "It's not as if we're doing a realistic interpretation of a horse. Otherwise, we'd just shoot it live-action. So, that was the challenge to find a way to portray more human emotions along with more equine ones."

Animators have usually avoided horse characters because the distance between their eyes and mouths makes their expressions hard to read. In order to help Spirit emote, certain changes had to be made. "It was a real challenge to give Spirit a face that could display readable emotions," Baxter says. "We did some design tricks, shifting his eyes a little further forward on the head, so you can see both eyes more readily, which makes his expressions easier to read. And we gave him nice big eyebrows -- which horses don't have."

The "Voices" of Spirit
Last year it was rumored that Bryan Adams, who wrote the lyrics for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, was being brought in to narrate Spirit as well. Later, DreamWorks officially announced that Matt Damon would do the narration. Today, DreamWorks contends that Damon was their top choice. Then how come a teaser trailer was released in Canada, which actually had Bryan Adams doing voice-overs for Spirit?

"It was temporary scratch dialogue that we used but it was never the permanent one," co-director Asbury insists. "Matt Damon was the final narrator we decided on period. Once we heard it that was it."