The Black Stallion’s (1979) happy ending is presented like one — the music is big, the visuals triumphant — before the movie subtly gestures to that happiness’s one-sidedness. The closing credits don’t extend those final moments, which show the race that has been won by the film’s young jockey protagonist and the horse he’s adopted. Instead they harken back to a moment earlier in the movie, when the pair are rolling around in the sand on a stretch of sunny beach, worried about nothing but each other’s company. Put another way: the horse is happiest when he’s free.

The Black Stallion is best when its eponymous equine is able to govern himself. He does for much of the film’s first hour. The movie begins somewhere off the coast of North Africa in 1946, where a little boy named Alec (Kelly Reno) is traveling on a steamer with a father (Hoyt Axton) who spends most of the trip gambling. Not long into the trip, Alec turns a corner and is captivated by a wild black stallion he sees being forced into one of the boat’s rooms by an owner so aggressive that, later in the movie, when a bored Alec tries visiting the creature to pass the time, he’s not averse to getting gruff and handsy. 

Mickey Rooney and Kelly Reno in The Black Stallion.

The journey’s tedium is one night jolted by a nightmare: the ship is throttled by some bad weather and becomes steadily engulfed in flame. (It’s a truly harrowing sequence precisely because the film’s director, Carroll Ballard, doesn’t move from Alec’s perspective, which is a hellscape of pummeling flames and a cacophony of screams.) Alec is thrown overboard; the horse, who never liked being on the ship in the first place, unhesitantly jumps off its side. The morning afterward, the two find themselves alone on a deserted island. With nothing on him but a switchblade, a special miniature horse statue gifted to him by his dad, and last night’s set of gray pajamas, Alec becomes a mini-castaway, able to subsist on little fish he spears and neither guts nor cooks. He also becomes a jockey in training, befriending the also-stranded equine with shared plates of seaweed, games of tag, and, eventually, full-on rides on the endless-feeling shores.

With no dialogue intruding, Ballard underlines the beauty of a bad situation. The impossibly blue waters and the creatures living within, from skinny silver fish to a wiggling urchin that awakens Alec one morning, are shot by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel with tourism board’s kind of admiration. The aesthetic splendor of The Black Stallion — most epitomized, I think, when Alec and the stallion play around on the beach at sunset, their silhouettes outlined by the orange sky and oceanic shimmering — only accentuates how lovely it is to connect with an animal you know is going to change your life.

The Black Stallion’s artful celebration of human-animal bonds dulls once Alec is inevitably rescued; it obligatorily moves into tried-and-true horse-movie beats. The stallion, referred to by his child owner as The Black, one day escapes his makeshift stable in Alec and his newly widowed mother’s (Teri Garr) backyard and too coincidentally makes its way to the home of a man, Henry (Mickey Rooney), who used to be a renowned jockey, his plentiful awards blanketed in years’ worth of cobwebs. “I got tired,” he says of his retirement over some pancakes he’s made for Alec. 

Kelly Reno in The Black Stallion.

Alec doesn’t have to try very hard to coax Henry into a professional second act to fashion The Black into a top-of-his-class racehorse. (Alec’s mother remains bewilderingly oblivious throughout it all, hardly suspicious that the horse that had once been in her backyard is suddenly gone and there are now newspaper headlines exclaiming about a new, mysterious racehorse on the scene.) In the film’s post-island scenes, Ballard maintains the movie’s visual magnificence and also some emotional distance. Ballard’s characters never feel very invested in — the avuncular relationship Alec develops with Henry in particular is surprisingly thin — and so the movie can feel like he wanted to make, above all, an arthouse children’s movie. The presentation, rather than emotional potency, is what’s foregrounded.

The Black Stallion’s superficiality doesn’t belie the compelling central question it raises without harping too much on. If the bait-and-switch ending weren’t enough of an indication, an associate of Henry, played by Clarence Muse, is firm to Alec in one mid-film scene: it’s important that this horse stays wild, not be trained into something he isn’t. How many of the warm feelings an animal can make us feel are mutual and not the result of our self-serving, potentially exploitative projections? The Black Stallion wonders beautifully.