Movie Review
‘Stripes’—Talking Animals
And a Teenage Heroine

© Kevin Paquet, 2005.

"Racing Stripes" begins when the Circus Sarand has a flat tire in a rainstorm in Kentucky. When they get it fixed, they somehow manage to leave behind a box containing a baby zebra, which is then picked up by the next guy along, a middle-aged single father named Nolan Walsh, who happens to be a farmer and horse trainer.

This is not immediately obvious, because Nolan spends most of his time on-screen either telling his daughter Channing she can’t do something or fixing various broken things around the farm, which looks like Green Acres but more run down. Due to some surrealistic zoning error, it sits about half a mile from Turfway Park, a horse track with, apparently, a certain amount of prestige. Stripes—the name given to the zebra by Channing—asks fellow horse Tucker about it.

You see, the animals talk to each other.

There’s Frannie the goat, Tucker the horse, Buzz and Scuzz the flies, Reggie the Rooster, and with their advice, Stripes immediately decides he wants to be a racehorse, and begins training against… the mailman. He also picks up a girlfriend horse named Sandy.

Since the movie’s obvious ending is the conflict with the Bad Guys, I’ll concentrate on the bits in the middle. "Racing Stripes" is High Melodrama with periodic Poop Jokes, which were presumably thrown in for the entertainment of any younger siblings accompanying the teenage girls this movie is aimed at.

The human protagonist is Channing, who dearly wants to ride Stripes at Turfway and gets in various, heavily stereotyped spats with her father when he isn’t trying to fix something.

Apparently, Chan’s mother was killed in a racing accident, and after that her father just sort of let the horse training aspect of his career go to seed, and he doesn’t want his daughter to try it. So of course she does, and there’s all sorts of teen angst that is, once again, cut with poop jokes.

My two favorite characters were, in fact, almost totally unnecessary. Reggie the Rooster is one, with totally wacky, verging on clinically insane, lines. Example (panic attack, fearing death, having KFC hallucinations): "I see a bucket of dear relatives!"

Then there’s The Goose, who arrives mid-movie and is (why not?), a pelican from New Jersey who flew away for fear of being "whacked." He constantly references "The Godfather" and tries to—you guessed it—poop on things. This isn’t why I like him. I like him because he’s the worst gangster I’ve ever seen in any "Godfather" parody, period. Reggie: "He’s a killing machine disguised as an idiot!"

The plot never really gets its pace right; first it’s moving too fast, then too slow. The plot and character types are ridiculously threadbare—not a bad movie so much as a movie that takes success from many, many previous examples. Bonus points for The Goose trying to "whack" Jan’s motorcycle, Reggie’s plan to rescue Sandy, and the entire cast of characters having names plundered from the 1941 Baby Names Book.

Kevin and his newly minted fourth semester of college give it two stars.