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Young Black Stallion at the IMAX cinema

Crystal Lindsay

Here’s a film quite up to children used to flat-out chases and special effects. This new production from Walt Disney is their first made expressly in IMAX format.

Young Black Stallion (PG) is a prequel to the 1979 film about the horse who manages to combine proud independence with an engaging willingness to be ridden by the right human being.

It's set in North Africa, at the end of the Second World War and the vast screen of sand-dunes holds your attention with crystal clarity. The right human being is a little girl whose misfortune it is to be separated from her family and lost in the desert – until a black colt comes along and saves her...

She'll lose him before she finds him again and sets out to ride him in a race and win back her equine inheritance. Thankfully, she's found her family too, along the way.

The story is simple and may remind you of National Velvet, where a young Elizabeth Taylor was also a girl hidden in jockey's garb, racing to save everything that matters. Here, there are stunning desert scenes, shot on Namibia's Skeleton Coast and shown to great advantage on the vast Imax screen.

The action practically kicks the sand in your eyes. It's a film of great visual charm, easily followed by the very young, with the fantasises of fertile mountain valleys (shot in South Africa) just through the rock pass and horses which can be raced unbroken if you love them enough. At 50 minutes, it's a perfect film for the family – and of course, horse-lovers everywhere.

• Walt Disney's Young Black Stallion (PG) is at the London IMAX in Waterloo; daily 10am and 7pm (weekends 7.30pm) until the end of August. Booking 0870 787 2525.

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