It was DreamWorks producer Jeffrey Katzenberg’s love of the horse that was the inspiration behind “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” the first ever animated horse film which debuts in theaters across the nation on May 24, 2002.

“I just love horses. I think the horse is maybe the most beautiful animal on the planet,” explained Katzenberg, a principal partner in DreamWorks SKG, a multi-faceted entertainment company co-founded by him, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in October 1994. Katzenberg most recently produced DreamWorks’ Academy Award winning blockbuster “Shrek.”

Katzenberg went on to explain that it was four years ago when he decided he wanted to “tell a story through the eyes of an animal. Something that had not been done since the Lion King.” He wanted to “take our audience into a world they never had been in before…the world of a Wild Stallion at that most romanticized moment in time…the late 1800s. That was the time when the horse really was the King of his domain.”

Take a Photo Tour of the evolution of the first ever annimated horse film