“Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” could not be more unlike its DreamWorks animated predecessor. After the jokey, chatty and pop-culture savvy “Shrek,” the company has produced a movie with virtually no dialogue, few jokes and very little edge.

What “Spirit” has is beauty. It’s a lovely slice of computer animation, a film that revels in the sight of animated horses galloping through dust, desert, snow and streams. Here’s a cartoon that approaches photo-realism in its depiction of the Grand Canyon, of the desert Southwest at dusk or in the midst of a thunderstorm, the way eagle feathers ruffle in flight. The pictures are glorious, almost imitations of Frederic Remington paintings, because they have to be. They, not the narration, tell the story.

Matt Damon narrates this tale of a wild mustang, from his birth to his many encounters with the two-legged interlopers in his world, to his final destiny.

Spirit must contend with the U.S. Cavalry, which wants to tame and ride him, with a American Indian who wants to do the same and with progress itself.

We see horse-laughs, horse-play and horsie courting. And we see him befriend Little Creek, the young Lakota the Army captures and who needs the stallion’s help to escape.

That’s all there is to the story. The horse is born, he grins and gallops, he fights efforts to ride him, he falls in love with a pinto and so on. Not having the animals talk saves us some of the anthropomorphism cartoons usually saddle on animals. Some, but not all.

And the simplistic morality of the Cavalry-Indians conflict is never more than mildly annoying.

The action sequences, including chases and a train crash, are wonderfully filmed.

But for all its striking looks, Spirit never rises above the bland. There isn’t enough character development or simple plot to carry it along.

And any time the filmmakers arrive at some emotional peak in the story, they plop a Bryan Adams song on the soundtrack to underscore, and undercut, what they’re doing visually.