I have not read Michael Murpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel. They made a stage version of it in 2007, that unfortunately I did not see, and that was met with great success. It told the tale of a horse raised by a boy in England. Once WWI begins, the boy’s father, strapped for cash, sells the horse to a soldier, and off it goes to its fate. The play used elaborate puppetry to convey the animal on stage, from a foal to a full powerful horse, standing up against tanks and dashing through No Man’s Land. Again, I didn’t see the play, but the clips and trailers I’ve seen on TV and the web show a pretty fantastic experience.
It seems to me that using puppets in a stage play is a good way to adapt a children’s novel about a WWI-fighting horse. I’d imagine the novel doesn’t get too brutal or violent, narrowing its focus completely on the horse’s experiences. Taking it to the stage in the way the creators did, the puppet’s demands on the audience’s suspension of disbelief works to its advantage; there’s a wonder in the realism the puppets can achieve, and part of that wonder helps prop the story up as a whole. They can’t take their eyes off the horse, rendering it with a love and importance that doesn’t just happen.
Spielberg’s film version suffers from the very realism and scope that the medium of film allows him to create. It’s no longer a puppet horse, it’s a real horse. That sense of wonder is gone, and now it’s an actual animal that the filmmaker is attempting to, at least in part, anthropomorphize enough that we connect with it (him) the same way the stage audience did with the puppet. So now we have a film about WWI - a horrible, brutal war - and yet every human character is focused purely on the horse. On stage, if some new character appears and instantly becomes enamored with the horse, it makes sense because the audience is awed by it (the puppet) as well. But here, every time the real horse runs through a real war zone to encounter real German soldiers, it’s a little too deus ex machina that every single person that finds him first is that one person in the whole area/group/armed force that instantly recognizes his true beauty and tries to protect him.
(Slight spoiler in this paragraph): There’s one scene when the horse is caught up in barbed wire in No Man’s Land. The English soldiers see him, as do the Germans. One of each climbs up and goes out to help untangle the horse. It’s a nice, simple and stirring moment of humanity admist the horrors of war: two enemies, chatting casually and trying to save the life of an animal. The moment is moving, but only magnifies how trivial the rest of the movie is by comparison. When you’re in the trenches of war, about to go over the top, waxing poetic about a horse sort of loses its romance for me. A horse does not seem like the most important thing you could be focusing on… maybe if it were a cool puppet. (end spoilers)
Add to this a broadly painted script, in which the characters we meet are almost exclusively speaking in hackneyed exposition. And John Williams’ relentless score (was he paid by the note?), which injects the same swelling musical emotion into a plowing scene and a battle scene alike, leaving nowhere for him to go. And even the direction: it didn’t feel like Spielberg to me. He’s broke cinematic ground for decades on conveying “wonder”, so it’s no surprise he’s drawn to this material, seeing what the stage play did for the story. But the realism of film hurts that story; a simple tale about a horse trying to get back home becomes a film that seems to be looking the wrong way the entire time.
