sent from: London, UK. destination: Munich, Germany

We saw ‘War Horse’ last night, a sort of unplanned happy accident. It was arresting, sweeping, beautiful. The story itself, the emotional journey of the characters, couldn’t have been slmpler (I can see why Spielberg was drawn to it), but the animals and the horses themselves, in particular the main horse in the story, Joey, were so richly, vividly and heartbreakingly brought to life with the puppets and performers that you felt you were watching some kind of magic. Once, I even thought – ‘get those humans out of the way so the horses can act!’. There’s something about this kind of performance, of animation – it’s tactile, simple – the horse is an abstraction, you can see the mechanics and the inner workings, but something about the human mind reaches across that gap and fills it with your own imagination, and in that meeting something transcendent is born.