Count your lucky stars! With so many movies coming out in 2020 based off classic children’s literature I have been repetitive in saying, ‘The Call of the Wild; the book is better.’ ‘The Secret Garden; the book is better.’ Well, I’ve never read Black Beauty, written by Anna Sewell in 1877, so it’ll all be as fresh to me as the first day of spring. I’m about to learn about this famous horsey through the medium of film.
Beauty (given voice by Kate Winslet) was once a wild mustang roaming the plains of Utah, before she was captured and brought to New York’s Birtwick Stables. Beauty proves the most wilful horse that trainer John (Iain Glen) has ever come across, but Beauty forms a bond with John’s niece Jo Green (Mackenzie Foy), allowing Jo to come near her, to begin her ‘partnering’. From there, Beauty takes on a number of jobs throughout the course of her life – she is rented to an affluent manor where she is ridden in contests, before being sold to a man who uses Beauty to rescue people lost in the wilderness. Beauty then becomes a taxi-horse in the city. Through all this, Beauty never forgets the friends she has made along the way, her mother in the wild, and her best friend Jo. This version of Black Beauty is written and directed by Ashley Avis.
I never saw Togo, about a sled dog through Alaska, but I heard a bit about it, and it seems like some of the Disney+ originals have continued a tradition of keeping real animals in films where they can; not everything has to be CGI in 2020 and I think that’s great. The motion-capture CGI didn’t really bother me in The Call of the Wild, but this is decidedly better, and having Winslet’s voiceover to gain Beauty’s perspective seems like a no-brainer; it optimises the storytelling, keeping the animal as our main protagonist, even as we perceive the events happening around her, as people. Moments like when this wild mustang allows Jo to tame her, may have felt unrealistic and sudden if not for the voiceover that’s able to provide the horse’s motivation and make it more believable. Black Beauty, especially early on, feels like a nature documentary with a narrative over the top of it. The voiceover provides poetic prose that help give the movie a most righteous classic feel.
I’ve been pushing my belief with these classic tales, that despite arbitrary subject matter, there’s always a universal moral that can be plucked out and applied to life, which is what makes these stories classics in the first place. I guess Black Beauty goes to show the effects of kindness over apathy and negligence, with the consequences that can ripple down the line. From place to place, Beauty comments on the varying conditions with which she is expected to live, with the most interesting comments coming when she was at the wealthy estate; how it looks glorious, but is sterile and loveless. Beauty says it herself, as she leaves the stables at Birtwick, how it’s the people that make a home. It’s confronting to hear Beauty long for Jo, and I contemplate how all pets might long for other stages of their lives as well – it made me think about my family’s dog, and how we took her in after an elderly neighbour died. Her name is Hollie, and although I’m very confident we provide her a good life, she still gets super excited when she sees neighbours who were close with her previous owner. I’m sure she thinks about her old life, and her transition to a new home must’ve been a challenge, and it’s sobering to hear an animal’s thoughts verbalised (fictionally still, of course). It also makes you think, where is that line between what an animal knows and what we know? Are most animals just as smart as humans, but just can’t speak to us or use apposable thumbs? The quest for knowledge continues.
I like Mackenzie Foy; I don’t care what anyone says. She’s building a nice littler partnership with Disney, following on from The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which I think I was only one in the world who liked that movie as well. But a big part of what makes this movie work is Iain Glen – he’s got a really earnest part to play, as John, Jo’s uncle and horse tamer, and he sells it. From early on, I noticed how careful he seemed in his speech, perhaps thinking his way through the American accent, as a Scot by nature. Whatever gets the job done, I suppose.
The movie has obviously updated a detail here and there – the aloof stable-keep with the heater is distracted with a mobile phone, a more recent invention, need I remind you. But the young bullies who tease Jo are the classic kind of mean; they actually made me laugh out loud. They say Jo smells and giggle to themselves. ‘You smell’; as far as insults go, an oldy but a goodie.
I’m going to give this movie another pat on the back because I think it takes a little courage to trust a voiceover to tell the story – take the voiceover away, and this movie is often just a camera pointing at some horses, with some well-placed sunsets in the distance. As cool as that sounds, I can buy calendars at the $2 shop with shots like that. Taking that into consideration, Black Beauty is a calm movie, but it takes concentration, so I’d encourage the more patient of young viewers to watch this movie, and the horse-crazed teenagers. Kate Winslet provides a fantastic narrative track, but if I was Family Guy, or just wanting to be ruder (which I do), I’d suggest it also would have been cooler if Beauty was narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker.
3.5
Leave a Reply