When the best thing about a film is the music being used in the trailer (Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams”), maybe you need to go back to the drawing board. Dreamworks Animation’s “Spirit Untamed” has vivid moments of beauty, but loses its gallop with a facetious storyline about identity as it keeps trying to define itself as an “empowering” film for little girls, missing the mark on both fronts

In the town of Miradero, Milagro Navarro, a fearless horse-riding stunt performer, wows crowds as her husband Jim (Jake Gyllenhaal) and daughter Fortuna, aka “Lucky”, look on in awe. A devastating accident leaves Jim heartbroken and Lucky motherless; the young girl is sent to live with her grandfather and Aunt Cora (Julianne Moore), where she spends the next decade attempting, and gleefully failing, to be a proper young lady.

After an incident that embarrasses her grandfather, Lucky returns with Aunt Cora to Miradero,...