

Black Beauty narrates the tale from his retirement pasture, where he reminisces on the varied treatment he has received from the hands of humans, starting with his birth. From his loving original owners, Beauty moves into a life of slavery, forced to serve as a rented workhorse to cruel aristocrats.
Kinder treatment comes when Beauty is sold to a sickly cabbie, who reminds the horse that not all humans are evil. Along the way, Black Beauty engages in a sweet-natured but tragically short-lived love affair with a horse named Ginger.
The darker aspects of Sewell’s novel (a stable fire, a bout with pneumonia and especially the cruel treatment from the horse’s aristocratic owners) were not shortchanged by the film’s makers, but neither was the idyllic, romantic view of the 19th-century English countryside as seen through the eyes of a beautiful black horse. Lyrical and poignant, the film was a clear alternative to noisier, flashier children’s fare being produced elsewhere.
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