Written by: David Schmidt
Starring: Bruce Greenwood, Hayden Panettiere, M. Emmet Walsh, Wendie Malick, Frankie Muniz
Rating: [3/5]
Underdog stories have a way of burrowing their way into our hearts because we see individuals fight back with all of the odds set against them to find a level of success. Sports stories come ripe with them but in Racing Stripes we see this play out with a zebra with dreams and hopes of becoming a racehorse. Despite some of its sillier elements that do not pass the sniff test, it works well in crafting an inspirational story not only for its zebra but also its human characters.
After a traveling circus has a cart breakdown, a zebra named Stripes (Frankie Muniz) gets found by local corn farmer, Nolan (Bruce Greenwood), who brings him home to the delight of his daughter, Channing (Hayden Panettiere). Now a bit older, Stripes dreams of becoming a racehorse as he watches the track from afar, which poses problems for him seeing as he’s much smaller than most premier horses in competition.
An admittedly silly little premise here, Racing Stripes presents a weird circumstance where a Zebra would somehow find itself in the middle of Kentucky and would then want to race amongst other horses. Quite the unique situation but his aspirations to strive and compete has all of the makings of a sports story we have seen before but this time we see it through animals. Therefore, it leaves the major question of how will these animals interact and how it all gets presented on screen. While it comes about in a fairly basic way, it does allow me to ruminate on the disaster The Lion King remake in 2019. A complete failure that cared more about how photorealistic it could make the animals as opposed to playing into the emotion inherent to the story. It stuns me that a film like Racing Stripes can drive home more emotion in the way it captures its animal characters. Sometimes the cheesy real thing can get the job where an overreliance in technological feats can.
As Stripes goes through his trials and tribulations in dreaming of racing, we also have the storyline involving the father-daughter duo of Nolan and Channing. We learn about Nolan’s success as a trainer of racehorses and how he refuses to allow his daughter to partake in riding them because of a terrible accident that involved his wife and her mom years ago. He has this fear he needs to overcome in order for her to follow her dream of succeeding in this realm. Again, nothing we have not seen before, but when this film gets to the heart of the emotion between these two, especially when we arrive at the final race, even now it does not fail to get to me on an emotional level. I guess I will always be a sucker for parental pride in witnessing their children’s accomplishments.
Where the film begins to falter appears in some of the ridiculous animal characters they introduce into the story. This mostly appears in Buzz (Steve Harvey) and Scuzz (David Spade). Some strange flies who somehow do some wildly dumb actions throughout the film that squarely exist to make children laugh. I can mostly forgive it given we get the dementedly funny Goose, who’s actually a pelican played by the great Joe Pantoliano. Playing a stereotypical New York gangster as a pelican somehow. This character enters the film and does nothing but ensue stupid chaos but I loved every moment with this deeply unserious character. Just when things got too overly sappy, he came right along to drive home some chaos and miss everything he tried to shoot out some excrement towards anyone he dislikes. Again, he displays more emotion compared to what we got from Simba watching his father perish.
Mixing in its overt silliness by telling a story through animals while also delivering a beautiful story of belief for Stripes along with the relationship between Nolan and Channing, this feature remains one that has aged perfectly well for me. Growing up watching this so many times due to us having the DVD at home, this feature always entertained me as a child and even now still finds its way as something that maintains a distinct value worthy of its own praise. Certainly does not have the best reputation overall, but I will take this any day over some overly animated lions who cannot emote.
Films with Josh 
