First Thoughts on “My Little Pony: The Movie”

I saw My Little Pony: The Movie on the Thursday night it opened, at the latest showing I could get. I took time off work to go, proving two things: a) I’m now a huge loser brony, just like I’ve always been a huge loser otaku, and b) I’m old and need my sleep, and I have to take time off work for stuff like this because I can’t just come back from the movies at one in the morning, go to sleep for six hours, and then get up and run off to work.

There were six people in the theater. Three were admiring fans who laughed at all the jokes. Two were hardcore neckbeard types who spent a lot of time complaining about the marketing and discussing the bad reviews. Then there was me, somewhere in the middle. The two neckbeard types saw the emptiness of the theater and opined that opening the movie against Blade Runner 2049 was a catastrophic decision. I have a different take: as vocal as the adult fans are, the core market for MLP stuff is still mostly the kids, and especially the female kids. Female kids, like kids in general, don’t go to late-night showings on Thursday nights. The crossover fandom for Friendship is Magic and Blade Runner 2049 is, I would guess, not that large in the grander picture, so Hasbro and Lionsgate felt comfortable splitting that audience by releasing their colorful animated pony movie with musical numbers against the R-rated art house sci-fi sequel to a movie from 1982, feeling comfortable that their movie, despite the existence of us bronies and pegasisters, would still mostly make its money from children. (I must confess I am part of that small Venn diagram overlap between My Little Pony fans and people who want to see Blade Runner 2049. I took a route that most probably didn’t: I saw MLP on Thursday, and I’m going back to see Blade Runner 2049 on Saturday.)

As a medium-core neckbeard type, I tempered my expectations a little going into the movie. I was expecting to see evidence on screen of the pressure there must have been during scripting to make the movie more accessible to a general audience. My worst-case scenario was fart jokes and references to Caitlyn Jenner that were topical two years ago when the movie was being written. Even in the best case, I was expecting most of the characters to get short shrift and be pushed aside in favor of the new characters, who are, after all, voiced by celebrities like Emily Blunt, Liev Schreiber, and Michael Peña. I was expecting something like Equestria Girls (the first one) that gets so caught up in squeezing all its plot, character introductions, and musical numbers into a too-short runtime that it barely has time to let us get to know anyone. But then I saw that Jenny Nicholson, my favorite YouTuber and co-creator of Friendship is Witchcraft, attended the premiere and liked the movie, and she’s way more particular than I am about pony stuff. So I decided to put my trust in Jayson Thiessen and Meghan McCarthy and went into the movie with an open mind, ready to give it the benefit of the doubt.

I’m glad I did. All my fears were unfounded. If anything, the movie did the opposite of what I was afraid of: it skewed too far away from the general audience, and it spent the end of the second act searching for extra material to fill the runtime—it let some interesting plot avenues go untrodden, but they were all tangential and would’ve been hard to work in anyway. The writers and the studio probably realized there was nothing to be gained by going too hard after a general audience. Their two major audiences were kids and bronies/pegasisters. The bronies and pegasisters are already familiar with the show. Most kids who would want to see this are probably also at least somewhat familiar with the show, but kids are also more willing to roll with something; they won’t get upset because they don’t know all the lore and haven’t read the prequel comics. Even if they do, they’re less likely to write angry tweets at the staff about it. So it made sense to make the movie story reasonably accessible for the kids, but not bother trying to draw in adults who didn’t care about the show. There was no reason to go too far from the spirit of the show by introducing Caitlyn Jenner jokes at this juncture.

The story and characters

The movie really established within the first few minutes that it understood the characters and the world and what made them great, and that it intended to execute on that. Even though some of the jokes made me groan (the “hungry, hungry hippos” line, the “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” line), that grounding made it easy for me to dismiss those as occasional bad lines that didn’t represent the whole of the movie, a lot like I was able to do with the bad parts of Equestria Girls for the same reason.

I’d resigned myself to an Equestria Girls-style story where Twilight advances the plot and gets all the characterization while the other Mane 6 stand in the background and sometimes tell jokes. But the movie, probably because it’s longer than the EG films, gets in good scenes for everyone except for Applejack. (The eternal problem: Applejack is just a hard character to work into these ensemble stories.) The plot structure is episodic, as the Mane 6 wander through the lands beyond Equestria seeking the Hippogriffs’ help in fighting off the Storm King, a weird baboon creature with unclear motives, and his henchpony Tempest Shadow, a unicorn with a broken horn and a chip on her shoulder. So for the first two acts, the Mane 6 come into a new situation and someone gets the chance to stand out, show how they make friends, and gain an ally for the third act. Rarity’s generosity sways the shifty cat-man Capper, Rainbow’s bravado inspires Captain Celaeno and her parrot air pirates, and Pinkie’s ebullience brings in the fun-starved seapony Princess Skystar. There isn’t enough time for Applejack or Fluttershy to get a piece of this, but Fluttershy still gets a few quintessential Fluttershy moments, like when she sits down with one of the Storm King’s foot soldiers in the middle of a big battle to have an emotional conversation about his feelings. The emotional climax of the movie is Twilight pulling a “Cute Re-Mark” a second time and talking Tempest Shadow into believing in the power of friendship.

The plot was really tight, possibly the tightest of any MLP story I’ve seen. The closest story on the show to this one, as far as theme and scope and structure, is “Twilight’s Kingdom”. As good as “Twilight’s Kingdom” is, there are still weird plot holes that, while they don’t ruin the emotional impact of the story, do stand out a little too much. (Why did the princesses think giving all their magic to Twilight and hiding her was the solution? Why did they then forget to hide the stained glass window, even knowing that Tirek was surely coming to the castle for them? Well, I have a theory that it was all a giant conspiracy between Celestia and Discord and was always meant to play out exactly the way it did, but that’s something for another time.) The movie’s plot does flounder a little at the end of the second act. If you had any illusions left that this was going to be spoiler free, please leave now, because the spoilers are going to get even thicker from here on out.

Everybody gone? Nobody here to begin with? Cool, works for me. So, the end of the second act. The main problem I had with it is that the seapony plot pays off in a weird way. Finding the seaponies at all ends up being kind of pointless. The narrative purpose of the entire seapony sequence was for Twilight to go all Captain Archer and try to steal the pearl, leading to her fight with Pinkie Pie, getting separated from her friends, and getting captured by Tempest Shadow. So the seapony sequence was a setup to the next vital step of the plot, but it ended up being a complete red herring as far as the characters’ actual goals; all that really comes out of it is Skystar reassuming her hippogriff form and joining the final battle, and she’s not even that helpful; Capper and the parrot pirates are far more vital.

It felt to me like there was way too much ceremony around this red herring that ultimately wasn’t going to matter. For narrative economy, they could’ve cut the entire seapony sequence and just had Twilight have a breakdown and yell at everyone, then wander off, when they find the Hippogriff kingdom empty, much as she does later on the beach. She still would’ve been mad at Rarity and Rainbow Dash for their carelessness earlier, so it still would have made sense.

The seapony sequence was a ton of fun, so I’m not suggesting it could’ve been cut out of bias. But it was, in large part, superfluous and wasteful to the narrative, except that it introduces a really interesting conflict: Twilight (and everyone else, honestly) has always taken Pinkie lightly, and towards the beginning of the movie, she does some things that make her seem flighty, unreliable, and dangerous to have in their situation (as she has on the show a few times, such as “The Lost Treasure of Griffonstone”, although nothing she does in the movie is that severe). Twilight decides that she needs to go Jack Bauer to save Equestria just as Pinkie is about to win them the help they need diplomatically, by making friends with Princess Skystar and getting to her mother through her. Pinkie, it turns out, understands the situation perfectly well, and she understands the power that her element, laughter, has to bring ponies together. But Twilight ruins it by trying to steal the pearl. Their argument on the beach afterward just reinforces how lightly Twilight takes Pinkie in particular, although she condescends to all her friends. Pinkie afterwards comes up with crazy schemes that help the group get into Canterlot and then up into the castle to save the princesses, reinforcing the point that she really is someone who can get serious and be useful in a pinch. Of course, Twilight and Pinkie make up, but the movie doesn’t have time to spend on the deeper dynamic between Twilight and Pinkie; Twilight admits she was wrong for trying to steal the pearl and for yelling at her friends, but we never get to explore her view of Pinkie that made her believe Pinkie’s plan wouldn’t work, even though setting that up was the only thing the seapony sequence accomplished that a breakdown in the empty Hippogriff city wouldn’t have.

In the end, I do think the seapony sequence was a net positive. It was a lot of fun; it had a great song; it introduced my favorite movie-original character, Princess Skystar (and her friends Shelly and Sheldon); and it hinted that even after all that’s happened, Twilight still underestimates Pinkie and the power of laughter, which is the basis for an interesting conflict, even if it was never played out on screen. Plus, it means that of all the Mane 6, the one who stands out most after Twilight is Pinkie Pie, and that’s something I never expected (and love). Pinkie also gets to tell plenty of jokes, but Rarity gets all the funniest lines, with her usual sarcastic complaints about roughing it in the wilderness and the non-fabulous nature of the situations the Mane 6 find themselves in.

Aside from my favorite movie-original character, Princess Skystar, Captain Celaeno and the pirate parrots were fun, and Capper was not as annoying as I thought he would be when he first appeared, but the real standout is Tempest Shadow. Her character arc is a lot like Starlight’s, but I have a feeling she’s going to get a lot more respect and love from fans, because she’s a cool, cruel, driven warrior-type. She deserves a place in the top rankings of Friendship is Magic villains. She’s threatening and scary, like Tirek or King Sombra, and there were times at the beginning of the movie where I genuinely thought she was going to murder someone. (She may have actually murdered that fish man in the town where the Mane 6 meet Capper.) Yet she’s also sympathetic once we learn more about her; like Starlight, the story never asks you to agree with the extremes she goes to to get what she wants, but it does let you see how someone could get there. Skystar vs. Tempest Shadow is yet another of those “Twilight vs. Pinkie Pie” things—Tempest has the deeper arc and drives the plot forward, but Skystar is so cute and so much fun to watch.

As I mentioned earlier, my only other disappointment, aside from the slightly draggy opening of the third act where we go through Tempest’s backstory, was that Applejack and Fluttershy didn’t get to have much of a part. I sort of expected Fluttershy to be minimized since she’s just as useless as Rarity in a fight, yet won’t speak up to complain about the plight of non-fabulosity in which she finds herself. So Fluttershy’s few standout moments were a nice surprise that I took gratefully. (And yes, she is uncharacteristically scared of horrific monsters in a few scenes. Forgive her. She’s far away from home in a scary new place.) But Applejack, as far as I remember, didn’t have a single standout moment after her part in the musical number “We Got This Together”. She tosses a rope a few times and says “Tarnation” every so often, but that’s about it. This was something that stood out to me, but I don’t put too much weight on this criticism since I don’t really know where you would have put an Applejack moment in the movie, as full as the plot already was. She’s not a character whose good side comes out well in small moments, so you can’t sneak her in on the side for a joke like you can with Pinkie or Fluttershy or Rarity. And since Pinkie gets the actual serious role out of all the Mane 6, that pretty much leaves Applejack out of luck.

The art

The art and animation style is totally revamped for the movie. It’s partially 3D. I have mixed feelings about this. I like 2D animation over 3D in general, and while Friendship is Magic is hardly the pinnacle of 2D animation, it looks pretty good and its style doesn’t translate well to 3D. I know they couldn’t have put Flash animation on the big screen, and I am glad they didn’t go full-3D—as far as I can tell, it’s cel-shaded, so it’s all CG but it’s made to look 2D. It looks a lot like Sofia the First with a higher budget.

The characters, which are the most cel-shaded and 2D-looking element, look a little weird—kind of shiny and plastic. I did get used to how they look by the end of the movie, though I honestly hope it’s too expensive to revamp the show to look like this. Their motions and expressions were pretty spot-on, though, which helped me acclimate to them. Some of the large moving objects, like windmills and airships, are in full 3D and look kind of terrible. I’m watching Last Exile right now, and the airships in that are also full 3D mixed in with 2D, and they look really terrible, in the same jarring way. On the other hand, the backgrounds are amazing. I loved the ominous look of the grey windswept seas above Seaquestria.

It seems inevitable that 2D animation will die and all animation will become 3D. I hope we’ll still have people preserving the old look with cel-shading, and I hope that cel-shading will get better and that we’ll look back on the cel-shading in My Little Pony: The Movie as a weird sort of transition form, the way we look back on the use of CG in Beauty and the Beast nowadays.

The soundtrack

Another thing I was afraid of before I saw the movie was a really terrible soundtrack full of modern pop garbage. This didn’t keep me up at night quite as much as it might have once; the Equestria Girls soundtracks kinda grew on me, and they did have some genuinely amazing songs, and lot more that really fun ones.

Again, my fears were needless. The music in the actual movie is amazing. You’ve got three classic My Little Pony musical numbers in “We Got This Together”, “Time to Be Awesome”, and “One Small Thing”; a solid villain song in “Open Up Your Eyes”; the catchy “I’m The Friend You Need”; and the pop finale, “Rainbow”, roughly your “Love is in Bloom” or “Make a Wish” or “Let the Rainbow Remind You” that closes out the movie. “Rainbow” is sung by Sia, a pop star who I had never heard of before this (I’m shockingly and infinitely ignorant of music, since I spend most of my time listening to anime and pony music). She sings it through her pony counterpart, Songbird Serenade, the new biggest pop star in Equestria from the escalating chain of them. (Sapphire Shores is the biggest pop star in Equestria! No, wait, Countess Coloratura is the biggest! No, now Songbird Serenade is the biggest! Reminds me of how villains work in shounen anime.) Ending with a big concert is a common trope of kids movies, but I’ve never seen one that set it up as well as My Little Pony: the movie starts with Twilight freaking out as she plans Songbird Serenade’s performance at the Friendship Festival she’s organizing, and ends with the performance. Zootopia is a great movie, probably an objectively better movie than My Little Pony: The Movie (sorry), but even it just sprung a concert on us at the last minute. Songbird Serenade was a Chekhov’s pop star. If there is a pop star in your movie, that pop star must perform a concert by the end. It’s a rule of fiction.

When you buy the soundtrack, it comes with seven other generic-sounding pop songs that aren’t by Sia or the Mane 6. One of them is in the movie—DJ Pon 3 plays it during the ending credits. The other six are just tacked on at random. But the songs that are actually in the movie are great. I bought the soundtrack the morning after I saw the movie, and now I can’t get “We’ve Got This Together” out of my head. (Though my absolute favorite is “One Small Thing”, the song that Pinkie Pie sings to Princess Skystar.)

Conclusion

I really liked My Little Pony: The Movie. It had some story elements that weren’t perfect, or were similar to things we saw in the show, and Applejack and Fluttershy didn’t get a whole lot to do, and some of the new animation didn’t impress me, but those are all minor complaints. Not only did it manage to not suck, it did some good and unexpected things: giving Pinkie Pie a bit of a serious role, introducing a great villain in Tempest Shadow, having Twilight go all Batman at the end of The Dark Knight. It truly did manage to bring the joy, charm, laughter, and lovable characters that I enjoy from the show into a theatrical movie.

So, what have we learned today? That we should always trust Meghan McCarthy and Jayson Thiessen, because they understand these characters and this world at a fundamental level, and they won’t let us down, even if the idea sounds terrible. And soon, I’ll know if the same holds for Denis Villeneuve, after I see Blade Runner 2049. The other thing we’ve learned is that it’s hard and costly to be in the small overlapping Venn diagram segment of Blade Runner fans and My Little Pony fans.