Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Black Beauty’ on Disney+, in Which Kate Winslet Gives Voice To the Inner Thoughts of a Horse

Mickey Mouse plumbs the public domain once again with Black Beauty, Disney+’s modern take on Anna Sewell’s beloved, oft-adapted classic novel. This era of streaming abundance is fertile ground for mid-budget productions nursing modest expectations, which means the horse-movie genre is experiencing a mini-renaissance of sorts, with a couple of outings like Walk. Ride. Rodeo and Rock My Heart trotting around on Netflix. But crucially, none of them consider the horse’s intimate thoughts to be a crucial part of the narrative like Black Beauty does, via the voice of the one and only Kate Winslet. Saddle up and get your hankies ready, people.

BLACK BEAUTY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Sparse piano. Melancholy. Winslet Voice, airy: “I was born in a golden meadow.” It takes a minute — yes, that’s the horse speaking. Think-speaking, to be precise, for its lips don’t move like Babe. Her home is all the outdoors and it’s huge and she runs free in it with her mother. They are mustangs, and they have Mustang Spirit. No, this isn’t a car commercial, promise. When she’s two years old, she gets curious about the two-legged animals who sometimes encroach the wilderness. This is a mistake. The men return and rope several of the herd and truck them off and corral them and our intrepid Winslet-brain-voiced filly protagonist saddles herself before anyone else can — with HORSE GUILT.

It’s not a great life, but in a world of kind people, indifferent people and lightly villainous people, thankfully one of the kind ones steps in to improve it. His name is John Manly (Iain Glen), VP of Equine Acquisition, Training and Overwrought Horse Metaphors at a ranch in New York state. The still-nameless-for-now filly is wild, and he has a firm respect for stubborn mustangs. He takes her back and she resists his firm, but kind attempts to break her. Who’s gonna ride this wild horse? NOBODY, I says. NOBODY.

Then one day, a station wagon arrives with John’s freshly orphaned niece in the backseat. She’s sullen, she’s stubborn, she’s Jo Green (Mackenzie Foy). She and John clash, because he was distant from the family and she doesn’t take kindly to talk of eatin’ grits. But that horse — that horse is alone and confused and wild too. Jo pencil-sketches the horse, and once you start sketching, you’re lost in love with a horse forever, you know. John nearly drops the dang bail o’ hay he’s haulin’ when he sees girl approach horse and horse stay shockingly calm. They bond and Jo at last names her: Beauty. And thanks to Jo’s gentle touch, Beauty finally relents to bridle, blanket and saddle.

But that’s just the beginning of Beauty’s story. This ranch ain’t a place for pets. Once the horses are trained, they’re sold, and that’s that. Jo negotiates a deal to tag along with Beauty after she’s leased to the filthy-filthy-rich Winthrop family for their snot daughter to ride for filthy-filthy-rich equestrian competitions. Jo connects with the bland hunk son (Calam Lynch) of the Winthrop family while his mother (Claire Forlani) wrinkles her nose at such “fraternizing with the help.” Teen romance vibes: activate! But what with one thing and another, this episode is followed by an episode of distressing parting and a couple other episodes of Beauty’s adventure-packed life. This horse really and truly lives. Lives like a fox</em.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is The Black Stallion crossed with that literally dog-brained inner-monologue-of-the-pooch movie A Dog’s Purpose.

Performance Worth Watching: The horse, but only when it’s not think-speaking corn-syrup tropes at us.

Memorable Dialogue: “A wise horse once told me that a mustang’s spirit can never be broken,” says Winslet, probably after giggling through 16 takes.

Sex and Skin: None whatsoever.

Our Take: “Do horses dream?” I typed into Google, deep thoughts inspired by Black Beauty, a movie that gives us plenty of time for dingbatty psycho-meanderings, because it’s paced like an old nag that won’t pick up the pace no matter how much you dig your heels into its ribs and whip its hindquarters — assuming you’re a villain in a horse movie and prone to such cruelty, of course. I’m not, so I let the movie plod along, trying to soak in its awkwardly melancholy beauty, manifest in its through-many-sheets-of-gauze photography, its stumbling horse metaphors, its flimsy approximations of human behavior, its dialogue that so gracelessly references the existence of poetry but so rarely resembles it, its utterly stifling humorlessness.

The characters here are gears in the screenwriter god’s machine; they have no interests or traits that don’t suit the plot’s needs. And it’s the plot that attempts to break us, the horse-audience in this tortured metaphor, because it will not relent from its manipulative course. It sees a potentially thoughtful and valuable lesson about life and the inevitability of loss as a hurdle, so it gallops right around it, uninterested in the challenge of being a movie that’s about something. Speaking of “breaking” — the Jo character doesn’t like applying such a term to how humans teach a horse to chill and let a body saddle up. She suggests the word “partnering,” and John Manly likes it. If any of you consider the practical evolution of language toward kinder tones to be P.C. horse manure, you will be triggered. TRIGGERED!!!!!!!11!!!!1!!

Need I say that Winslet’s voiceover is A Bit Much? It’s 100 cringes distilled into breathy words; it’s what some human beings assume a horse’s inner self-dialogue to be, and it’s so, so embarrassing. Horses are lovely majestic creatures. Please respect them, and let them have their thoughts for themselves. I imagine many of them are about eating and not dying.

Admittedly, I’m not the target demo for Black Beauty. It likely wants to bullseye young horse enthusiasts with its PG-rated pillowsoft drama. But I can be helpful and say it shows little interest in crossing over to other audiences, who may snicker and eyeroll at its plaintive greeting-card earnestness and how it stacks up inspirational cliches as high and deep as your aunt’s Pinterest page. Now, I believe in the profundity of human-animal connections. I had a cat once who wore me like a shirt, and I felt, irrationally no doubt, like we knew each other’s thoughts. But I would never dare translate his thoughts into assumptions and put them on paper for George Clooney to read atop a golden-hour shot of him swatting a dust bunny under the fridge. It just seems like a bad idea.

Our Call: SKIP IT. (Gene Shalit voice) Is this whinny-Winslet flick a winner? Neigh!

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Black Beauty on Disney+