Spirit: Riding Free

A Town Where Growing Up Looks Like a Gallop

latestnetflix.com's take is that What I keep coming back to with Spirit: Riding Free is how earnestly it believes that freedom can be practiced.Not preached. Practiced.

In a lot of children’s entertainment, “independence” gets reduced to a slogan or a pose — a girl says she won’t be bossed around, a horse bucks, everyone learns a tidy lesson. This series, which ran for eight seasons and 52 episodes, is gentler and more insistent than that. It treats freedom as a skill you stumble toward with scraped knees, mud on your boots, and friends who tell you when you’re being impossible.

That’s a useful place to begin, because the show arrives with a familiar burden and a fresh angle. It’s tied to Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (the 2002 film), but it doesn’t try to imitate that movie’s wordless grandeur or its more mythic idea of the wild. Instead, Riding Free is a TV series about routine, community, and the low-stakes bravery of being eleven or twelve and still not quite knowing where you fit.

The title sounds like a promise of open range, and the show keeps that promise in a more domestic key: fences, dusty streets, school squabbles, small acts of defiance. It’s a Western filtered through the rhythms of a friendship show, which means the frontier isn’t just a landscape. It’s an emotional condition.

That shift matters. The old Western usually asked who could tame the land; this one asks who gets to move through it without being shaped into somebody else’s idea of a proper girl. Lucky Prescott, voiced by Amber Frank, is an ex-city kid dropped into a small frontier town, and the show gets a lot of mileage out of her impatience.

She’s not the saintly center of a lesson plan. She’s restless, touchy, curious, sometimes a little self-important — which is to say, recognizably young. The writers don’t flatten that into “spunk,” thank goodness.

They let her learn social pressure the hard way, through embarrassment and compromise. That’s where the series finds its best emotional texture: not in the horse-riding flourishes, but in the awkwardness of trying to belong without surrendering yourself.

The best children’s series often understand that style is already a moral statement, and Spirit: Riding Free knows this instinctively. The animation is bright but not obnoxiously glossy; the colors lean warm and sun-bleached, with enough dust and open sky to keep the town from feeling plastic. The horses move with a pleasing weight.

You can see when Spirit is annoyed, amused, or determined; the animators don’t just give him expressive eyes and call it a day. His body carries opinion. So do the girls’ postures.

Lucky leans forward like she’s always about to argue. Pru, voiced by Sydney Park, is straighter, more measured, the kind of kid who seems to have already rehearsed the adult version of herself. Abigail, voiced by Bailey Gambertoglio, often reads as the comic accelerator — eager, impulsive, eager again — but the show gives her more than simple silliness.

Darcy Rose Byrnes’s Snips, meanwhile, is one of those recurring irritants children’s shows need: a reminder that insecurity often wears a smug face.

I was struck, especially in the early episodes, by how much the series trusts small visual business. A glance across a stable. A hand tightening on a saddle strap.