"Ash" wrote:My husband saw War Horse and hated it. Said it played like Black Beauty Goes to War. He kept expecting Lassie to show up at any moment (neither of us are big on real animals being anthropomorphed as human)
Actually, one of the things I LIKED about War Horse is that it didn't anthropomorphise the horses. It just showed them being reasonably well-trained horses. They didn't talk, or do anything a horse couldn't or wouldn't do. As a sometime dog-llama-horse trainer (of people more than their animals), I have to spend most of my time getting 'Bambi' out of the owner's heads and helping them understand the very specific ways that their animal's brain is set up to think. I'm always grateful when Hollywood helps with that, and I grind my teeth (anticipating more work in the future) whenever some movie shows animals thinking and acting like humans.
The one that really teed me off was Marley and Me, which made the trainer into a witch and glorified horrible dog-owner behavior as 'cute'.
