Relationship Spotlight: Friendless & Brown Eyes (Go West)

Brown Eyes has the distinction of being the first animal to be featured on the blog.  She even beat out talking animals like Dug from Up!  She deserves it, because she’s fab.  At its heart, Go West is about the friendship between a boy and his cow, and maybe that’s a little sappy, but both characters sell it with everything they’ve got.

From their Aesop’s fable-esque introduction – Friendless removes a rock from Brown Eyes’ hoof (grammatical errors be damned, I’m going to use the plural possessive form for both, just because “Brown Eyes’s” and “Friendless’s” looks so weird) – these two are thick as thieves.  After failing to win over any of the other cowboys and having no luck with the horses, the mule, or the other cattle, Friendless’ rapport with Brown Eyes is so easy and natural.  I love that, once he removes the rock, he tips his hat to her, and I like how she just falls in line behind him and he doesn’t even realize it at first.

Much of the story centers around Friendless’ various attempts to help Brown Eyes.  There’s of course the big one, his fierce determination to save her from the stockyards, but it’s little things, too.  He sits up at night to keep watch against coyotes, he helps her stand up to the bullying steers (hint:  it involves a rack of antlers and a getup similar to Max in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and it’s fantastic!), and when he hears her mooing in distress, he gets a full-on Dashing Hero Run to come to her rescue.  In that last instance, it’s to protect her from being branded, and after unsuccessfully trying to hide her, he comes up with one of his cleverest ideas in the movie – shaving a “brand” onto her flank with his razor and shaving cream.

I like that a lot of these are smaller matters, because it feels more like a legitimate friendship that way.  Friendless doesn’t just want to keep Brown Eyes from getting slaughtered – he wants to keep her from getting scared or picked on or hurt, too.  And with the steers, he does more than give her the means to fight back.  We’re not privy to what he says, but we see him giving her a mini pep talk, no doubt encouraging her to get back out there and prove that the others can’t push her around.  So, in addition to swooping in to help her, he helps her to help herself.

So what’s Brown Eyes’ part in all of this?  Is it all give-give-give on Friendless’ side without anything in return?  Well, it’s not as pronounced, but she’s no slouch, either.  Again, we get the big instance of her protecting him from a charging steer when he’s unable to run away.  More than that, though, she befriends him.  In case you haven’t gathered it from his name, Friendless isn’t exactly flush with chums.  The other cowboys try to mess with him and push him around, and, seeming to realize that getting on their good side is an uphill battle, he doesn’t really bother.  In the running gag where Friendless is always too late for meals, arriving just as the food runs out and everyone gets up from the table, his victory isn’t to make it on time to join the rest of the ranch hands.  It’s to get there before everyone and be finished eating by the time they arrive.

In other words, he’s on his own a lot, and Brown Eyes’ devotion to him is probably a big part of why he cares about her so much.  She follows him around the ranch, keeping at his heels like a faithful dog.  I imagine that simply having someone who seems to appreciate him and want to be around him isn’t a luxury Friendless often gets, and he hangs onto that companionability when he finds it, even from non-humans.