It’s a dark, sad children’s story that is beautifully told – there are no silly horse voices or cheese ball animal/human friendship or “everyone is happy and learns a valuable lesson” ending.
— Audrey
, about The Silver Brumby
, about The Silver Brumby"There's this really widely-held assumption that if a story has talking animals in it, it's probably for kids. I mean… (scoffs) …grown-ups know that animals can't talk! Obviously! So if our hero is a charming little mouse or a whimsical rabbit or a talking cat or dog, their adventure will surely be something fluffy and shallow, unlikely to resonate with the parents in the audience. What does a mouse in an ascot know of serious things, like taxes or infidelity?
"Now, I'm not entirely sure where this idea came from. I think it's an offshoot of the more broad idea that fantasy is for kids - which is something Tolkien famously fought against very aggressively. And Tolkien did the world a service by proving once and for all that a story could have magic and wizards and fairy tale motifs while still being very grown up: steeped in the horrors of a world torn apart by war; meditations on the petty, selfish cruelty of evil; staggering portrayals of the deep and invisible scars that war leaves on its soldiers, and the slow, monotonous agony of the march to the end of the journey. But because the only talking animals Tolkien prominently featured were noble eagles, the "talking animals" side of fairy tales didn't really get the post-The Lord of the Rings facelift the rest of the folklore space enjoyed.
"Wizards and elves and magic rings got a nice precedent to be taken seriously, but talking animals stayed over in the Narnia side of things, which— despite getting weirder and hornier with time and sequels— remained very fixated on childhood as a necessary prerequisite for getting whimsically isekai'd into fairyland to kick it with God's fursona. What I'm saying is, talking animals still get stereotyped as a kid thing, despite a truly shocking number of stories that seem hell-bent on disproving that through the rather obvious method of acknowledging the brutality of nature, red in tooth and claw. Stories about mice, rats, rabbits and rodents of all stripes have made their forays into scarring unsuspecting youth whose parents saw a bunny on the cover and assumed it was baby friendly."
