Review: Adventure Time “Horse and Ball”

However, just as Finn, Jake and Bmo run outside to see James, the ball James is balancing on pops. James loses his happiness, and Finn takes him inside to rest as Jake goes to try and find a patch for the ball with BMO.

Jake and BMO run across the Raggedy Princess at the Ooo Junkyard, and ask about a patch for the ball, but she says she doesn’t have one– even though that’s not completely true.

Finn is still trying to cheer up James at the house, and Shelby the worm has some hilarious lines (“…slap him, dude. With real talk”.) We also get to see James’ origin story. He came from a city of anthropomorphic horses (think Bojack Horseman, but all horses) and he left and threw his money in a river. We also see where he found his name (funny and cute) and why he began to balance on the ball– to cheer up a friend in a cave.

“Horse and Ball” was an interesting episode because it stressed the importance of entertainment, and happiness and art— especially in dark times like today’s real world. At the end, James has a kind of renaissance and changes his style. The episode also emphasizes the importance of reinventing oneself and changing with the world, to your circumstances.

This episode is also unique because the real person named James Baxter was one of the animators for it. He has worked on such Disney films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and non-Disney films Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and the Spongebob Movie! Wow. Really cool stuff.

Adventure Time episodes really work best when the nonsensical aspects of them integrate properly with real world concepts, and they’re less weird for the sake of weird– I think AdTi kind of fails when it does the latter. That said, “Horse and Ball” bridges that gap well, and had some really interesting spots.