His name is Eo he seems to understand

EO is a remake/reimagining of Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar. I've never seen Bresson's film so I cannot speak to the similarities/differences.

Eo is a donkey who goes from danger to danger, from predicament to predicament in a manner that reminded me of Forest Gump. It's not that Eo doesn't take matters into his own, er, hooves, on occasion as he does when he takes out a fence to escape a farm. But most of the time he is forced to navigate the vagaries of man-made environments and the caprices of human nature.

When the movie opens, our donkey hero suffers the indignity of being part of a circus act, though he is beloved by one of the other performers, a young woman. The authorities close the circus down and Eo is sent to a horse farm where he assists the horse trainers. These are not draft horses but rather show horses, I guess you'd say. The Adonises of the equestrian world.

We get close-ups of Eo's big brown eyes that may show the animal's weariness or may instead reflect the viewer's feelings. We get flashbacks of the woman from the circus petting him that tempt one to think the movie is showing Eo looking back with affection. But perhaps it was just "I like pets and carrots." Director Jerzy Skolimowski largely relegates humans to the background and instead we get intimate micro portraits of animals - we hear their breathing, horses whinny and neigh, wolves howl, a spider in close-up scurries up a strand of its web, and so on.

There are a couple people who show genuine compassion for Eo, more that show indifference to his plight, and others who are hostile to him as well as other people.

I really enjoyed the little touches that Skolimowski injected into his movie such as the scenes that are lit red and take on a tint of unreality. And then in one scene a gate seems to magically open, as if by Eo's will, to allow his escape.

I'm unsure of the movie's message, at least the one that isn't given to us via some text at the end just before the credits. Human beings both harm and heal Eo. There are wolves would eat Eo but other animals are content to graze. I suppose it shows that humans are animals just like donkeys but also have powers over and stewardship responsibility for creatures even if they simply want to stand around and eat grass.