Thundering, unbridled, across the screen, reins and restraint tossed aside, a formidable consortium of talents charges headlong into the challenge of converting this picaresque animal classic into a galloping movie.
Consider these people and their rich heritage of sentimentality: director Steven Spielberg, co-writer Richard Curtis, Disney studio execs.
Throw them in a room with a tear-jerker such as Michael Morpurgo's 1982 horse-buster and you can grow mushrooms in the resulting damp and dark of a cinema floor.
There is also remarkable cinematographer Janusz Kaminiski who plucks the early scenes from Cranford and the war scenes from Spielberg's own formidable back catalogue and washes the whole thing with a Disneyfied light, making every scene as lush and hyper-real as a Carravaggio.
This, then, is the film that comes from craftsmen at the top of their game, a rich confection of home-spun hokum and world-gone-awry madness.
Scenes stand out. The naïve cavalry charge of the British, swords raised, against the machine guns of the Bosch. The shivering terror of Tommies waiting for the whistle, no-man's land, and certain death. The timpani of hooves, the timpani of the guns, the honeyed sunsets of pastoral Devon. Everything is alive and vivid.
At the centre is Joey, a free-spirited thoroughbred who goes from home farm to home front, passed from hand to hand, linked by some spiritual bond to his first owner, the simple Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) who tames the rebel and vows to find him when debts and drink force his family to sign him up to the Army, a route that Albert pledges to follow when he turns 19.
There are flaws in the film. Joey is one minute a canny, all-knowing horse-human, up with the plot and predicting developments (Lassie with a saddle). The next, he is a dumb victim of man's folly and random cruelty.
He is passed from custodian to custodian like the Curse of the Black Spot, apparently bringing woe to everyone he encounters so, aside from Albert, we never know anyone fully or for long.
And despite the blood and cavalry charges and gruelling ransack of the Somme, this is still a children's book and "good people" in the Dickensian high-twee style, appear with perverse regularity.
But that's Spielberg. Unashamed and playing with a straight bat. He is everywhere - from the focus on story, to the beautifully mounted setpieces, to the arch manipulation.
Swift and sure, War Horse captures the brilliant emotional simplicity of ET but with the added lacquer of 30 years of life.
