Starring: Frankie Muniz, Dustin
Hoffman, Whoopie Goldberg
Released:11th Feb 2005
Cert: PG
A zebra foal gets adopted by a
mid-western farmer and his daughter who live next to a racetrack. ‘Stripes’
(Muniz) mistakenly believes he is a horse and will one day become a
racehorse.
The path to realising his dreams
is impeded by the teasing of young horses, the intolerance of older ones and the
farmer’s fears for his daughter’s safety due to the death of his wife during a
horse accident.
This is pretty much the same
story as Babe and the same animation of live action but with different animals.
The story formulaic and easy for the kids to keep up with and mostly fuelled by
slapstick and toilet humour. A plethora of quirky characters prevents
concentration from wavering; an Italian mobster pelican, two hip-hop poo-eating
flies, a surly Shetland pony (Hoffman) and mothering nanny goat (Goldberg) make
up the main supporting cast.
Your sense of humour has to be
pretty basic to really enjoy this but the story is so inoffensive and the
animals delightfully and comically anthropomorphised that we can sit back and
enjoy along with the kids.
