By Jasper Murphy
In season 1, episode 10 of the children’s animated show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the character Apple Bloom tries out a myriad of different activities to try and uncover her predestined, genetically encoded talent. The scene plays out as a montage, showing her failing miserably at kite flying, roller skating, hang gliding, and karate. When her coach suggests she tries juggling, it cuts to Apple Bloom haphazardly flailing her arms to keep a number of balls in the air for a few seconds before she loses her balance and they come crashing down on her head. Oh well, it seems she just isn’t meant to be a juggler.
“My Little Pony”: Apple Bloom tries and “fails” at juggling.
In this scene, Apple Bloom juggles six balls in siteswap 7777770, managing to get an impressive ~25 catches before falling over. Her very first time juggling, Apple Bloom does something that would take most jugglers years and years of training… From a juggler’s perspective, this is not just evidence of innate juggling ability, but of perhaps the greatest potential for any juggler who has ever lived! And she doesn’t even have fingers!
Having seen this episode as a child, I could never quite get this scene out of my mind. While cartoons would often depict characters pulling off difficult juggling tricks at the drop of a hat, this scene went out of its way to suggest that Apple Bloom’s attempt was underwhelming and embarrassing. Clearly, I thought, the writers of this show have no understanding of how difficult juggling is, nor how jugglers gauge success. While this might very well be true, nowadays I have more of an understanding of the animation production pipeline and recognize that occupational realism probably isn’t a priority when making a show about magical ponies.
Nonetheless, this episode sparked my obsession with animated juggling and how fictional media portrays jugglers. I started noting down examples of animated juggling, be it in cartoons, movies, video games, advertisements, or social media. When watching television with friends, I would often scramble to find the remote so I could pause the episode and write down the timestamp for a juggling scene. Seven years later, I had amassed 50 or so examples in the Notes app on my phone, a number which I was rather proud of. Then, I created a spreadsheet to start properly cataloguing clips, inserting links to the original videos and writing descriptions of each juggling trick. With this, I had everything I needed to actualize the next step in my plan—a short form video series reviewing animated juggling.
“Juggling in Animation” Spreadsheet
In 2023 I began posting daily “Juggling in Animation Review” videos on Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube: one minute shorts where I analyze a juggling animation, try to replicate the pattern in real life, and then give a score based on the realism of the animation and the difficulty of the trick. At the end of each video, I prompt the viewer to comment where they’ve seen animated juggling, and within days I had an army of internet users rushing to my comment section and my inbox to let me know about where they were seeing juggling in their favorite media. My spreadsheet quickly expanded to over 200 unique instances of animated juggling. Some commenters were kind enough to give me the exact timestamp where I could find a juggling clip, while others would vaguely suggest that there was a juggling scene somewhere within the 172-episode run of “Rugrats.” Needless to say, I spent a lot of time watching cartoons that year.
After a few months I began to burn out of making daily videos, and the backlog of unreviewed animations ballooned far beyond what I expected. I decided to combine every single clip into one massive long-form video essay to cover my thoughts on animated juggling in its totality, as I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the matter. Originally intended as a video for the juggling world, it ended up spreading to a variety of animation and media communities who nonetheless found the topic interesting (although a number of them complained that I didn’t explain the difference between a shower and a cascade pattern).
In the video I walk through different animation styles (2D, 3D, interactive media, stop-motion, live action hybrid animation, etc.) and describe how the medium influences the style of juggling depicted. I won’t go into detail on the specifics here but will rather encourage you to watch the video as the animations are obviously best enjoyed in video form. Many of the clips are truly entertaining and the combined work of all the artists who created these animations far eclipses the effort I took to compile them together.
Breakdown of “Interactive Juggling” depictions vis-à-vis square diagram
Various Depictions of Juggling in Animation
I have big-picture thoughts on animated juggling, some of which didn’t make it into the video as the focus was more on bombarding the viewers’ eyeballs with a new copyrighted intellectual property every few seconds. While my frustration with My Little Pony was primarily with its concept of difficulty and expectations within juggling (i.e. dropping makes you a bad juggler), the more common issue jugglers seem to have is with the overrepresentation of the “shower” pattern in animation. About 50% of the animated juggling represented in my database depicts the shower pattern, a much higher figure than one might expect considering it isn’t the “correct” or perhaps more accurately the “standard” juggling pattern (that being the cascade and the fountain).
So why does this happen? My first instinct, and perhaps the most likely answer, is that the shower pattern is relatively easy to animate. Animators are constantly struggling to keep on schedule under tight deadlines, and making objects go in a circle is a lot more straightforward than trying to emulate the interwoven figure-eight path of a cascade. Since the appearance of a juggling pattern usually isn’t especially relevant to the plot of an animated show, it makes perfect sense for an animator to choose a pattern that will let them finish the shot the fastest.
Another possibility is the preexisting mental image of juggling in animators’ heads is that of a shower pattern. After all, most jugglers have had the experience of teaching somebody how to juggle and watching them instinctually throw two balls in a shower pattern. But many of those beginners say that that instinct comes from watching characters juggle in cartoons! A sort of “chicken or the egg” feedback loop of misrepresentation.
One important note is that the overabundance of the shower pattern appears to be fading away. A rudimentary search shows that prior to 2008, the spreadsheet contains 79 mentions of “shower” and 36 mentions of “cascade”: a ratio of over 2:1. However, post-2008 there are only 32 mentions of “shower” and a whopping 62 mentions of cascade—a near complete reversal! Could it be that with the onset of the internet that animators were more likely to look up reference videos for juggling and thereby choose to depict the more common cascade pattern? Or perhaps the overreliance on the shower pattern is a relic of 2D animation, and the shift towards 3D and realism in the last few decades comes with it an inclination for the cascade?
Many jugglers will be excited by this trend—finally, juggling will have the accurate depiction in media that it deserves! No more non-jugglers insisting that the shower pattern is the way juggling “should” be done! And while there’s certainly some surface level benefit to this trend, I fear that we might lose something profound along the way; when you watch animated juggling created before easily accessible internet reference footage, you’re getting a unique glimpse into the mind of how non-jugglers conceptualize juggling in a vacuum. Animators in the 80’s and 90’s, who presumably didn’t have an IJA Championships VHS laying around, were putting to the screen what they imagined juggling to be—impressive, comedic, chaotic, or otherwise.
Many old-school juggling animations were simply a loose approximation of some random juggler the artist remembered seeing in a traveling circus years prior. While it is certainly impressive to see a perfectly rendered 3D character juggling 5 clubs in an immaculate cascade pattern exactly obeying the laws of gravity and physics, I worry that this new standard of realism will mean just that: animated characters doing juggling tricks I can already watch someone do in real life.
To be fair, I’m sensationalizing this point a little bit. For one, this concern isn’t exclusive to juggling; sacrificing creativity for the sake of simulating reality has been a debate in animation circles for decades. And animated juggling is far from reaching a point of homogeneity—I still see plenty of fanciful, creative, and delightfully unrealistic depictions in modern media, although the boringly accurate three ball cascade is becoming worryingly common. Whatever form it might take, I hope juggling continues to appear in animations for many years to come.
Linked below is the video essay containing over 200 examples of animated juggling… Do give it a watch! I still make sure to update the spreadsheet anytime someone shares with me a new animation, on the off chance somebody else one day finds a use for all this. If you come across something, be sure to let me know!
Jasper Murphy is a professional juggler, multi-instrumentalist, and circus entertainer based out of Philadelphia, PA. He frequents numerous juggling festivals across the globe and performs his high-level technical juggling and one-man-band contraptions on stages nationwide.
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