Art and Anarchy for Everypony · 1:18pm Nov 27th, 2022
Sneaksy Strikes Again is now one of my favourite Tell Your Tale episodes. It looks like the artists had a lot of fun making with this one. Each time I watch it I spot something new. Let’s delve into the world of art, for everypony.
Beginning with a hint of what is to come, we start we a glimpse of pony version of street artist Banksy’s Girl With Balloon. While much of Banksy’s work is dark and political. This is a simple image of a black and white figure with a red heart to convey a message of hope.
We now get another view of the Houvre museum of art. I missed it when first watching The Unboxing of Izzy, but I take it the glass construction outside is supposed to be a giant inverted hoof. While that lacks the geometric perfection of the Pyramide du Louvre, it makes up for it with pony pun potential. Now I want to know the backstory behind this monument. Was this a big architectural project commissioned by some past Maretime Bay leader seeking to stamp their hoof print on the city design, and annoy their conservative rivals, à la François Mitterrand? I can imagine Phyliss Cloverleaf playing some role in this story.
I love Izzy’s embrace of anarchy with the cause of making art for everypony. There’s something very noble about working in secret not for personal gain or recognition, but just to create beautiful art for everyone to enjoy, and not getting overly worried about legal or copyright problems. A bit like posting your fan fiction online. Oh yes, we are the creative heroes who make the world go round and round.
The view of authority is an interesting difference between G4 and G5 MLP. In Twilight Sparkle’s day, Equestria was basically run by a system where the tallest female is in charge because they know best. A form of government familiar to young children in homes across the world. G5 Equestria feels like a teenage rebellion where authority doesn’t always know best and has to be challenged by medium sneaky means. Yet we have Hitch present to remind us that sometimes you have to obey the law.
Queen Haven ordering a work of art to be cut off the wall and brought back to Zephyr Heights is very British Empire—first thoughts are the Parthenon frieze, cut off the Acropolis in Athens on the order of Lord Elgin with highly questionable legality, now in the British Museum. You can’t blame the aristocracy for appreciating great art, although you can blame them for a lot of things. Is Queen Haven setting the scene for a future breakdown in trust between pegasi and earth ponies, which Sunny and friends will need to fix?
The more contemporary interpretation is the many many many stories of street murals being removed and sold for huge sums at auction. A predictable consequence of capitalism that does rather go against the spirit of street art. Izzy’s relaxed response to her works removal is to be expected from a real street artist. If you care about the preservation of your work, this is not the best medium for you.
Despite her lawbreaking, Izzy doesn’t really embrace the anti-authority side of street art. In this respect, Sunny is much more aware of its subversive potential.
If graffiti changed anything it would be illegal
Yet Sunny doesn’t have Sneaksy’s artistic skill. I now want an AR fanfic in which Sunny is an underground Pony Unity activist in a dystopian Maretime Bay, who while out at night sticking up posters, meets the secretive street artist Sneaksy, and together they team up to change the world.
I have fallen behind on Tell Your Tale in recent months and hadn't seen this episode before. Thanks for the head's up.
I was deeply amused that a queen decided she liked something and immediately sent armed guards to seize it by force over the objections of the locals. Queen Haven may be my favorite character in g5.
The... *checks* "hoof-five"? Really? Five of what, Izzy? Well, whatever. That thing, between Izzy and Sunny, shows clearly that Sunny has dainty slender hooves compared to Izzy's heccin stompers, which doesn't seem to be the case in 3d. Huh.
Posey as the curator of the Houvre, in spite of her evident enthusiasm for street art, makes me think there's a Duchamp's "Fountain"-style conflict between her and Izzy about what is appropriate for the art world coming. There could be a story in that.
Personally, I am becoming very fond of Posey.
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I wonder how Sneaksy and Izzy will develop as artists. Could we see Sneaksy become famous worldwide for her radical vision and new style, while Izzy is just that ditzy unicorn who throws glitter everywhere?
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Posey's near-constant, and frequently justified, disgruntlement speaks to the adult soul.
My favourite works are those in locations where teh damage caused by removing them would approach the expected auction price.
If nothing else, shorts like this show how much, much easier and affordable it is to make new assets for one-off stories in traditional animation emulating the ol' cel-shaded style (it is, of course, 100% done on computers) relative to fully-rendered CG animation, when both are on small budgets. And I have no doubt MYM has a much larger crew, budget and schedule than these (we can see this via shorts that introduced things from MYM ahead of their official debut there, like Izzy's crafting vehicle; evidently the shorts' writers worked off the provided and locked MYM scripts, but theirs got finished first, and nobody higher up cared to coordinate the airdates), and yet this is still… well, not visually better, and the character design remains rather ghastly (the bean-mouth aesthetic does not work with equine faces). And these shorts have actual visual energy too. Honestly, by the end of G5, I'm pretty sure TYT will have had a much wider range of locations, props and characters (Rufus, the stage magician pony, one of the few townsponies that's actually both distinctive and likeable, seems to have been created just for TYT).
Hey, what can I tell you, animation production is expensive as it is, multiplied several times for a CG show.
In any case, I do find myself admiring the impulse behind many of the one-off pieces of art in many of these shorts. I actually kind of like Izzy's gear while under the Sneaksy persona too. Course, Haven having a wall stolen for her is just… no, just no. Though I can't deny she, and her family dynamic, is just about the only interesting thing in the show when it pops up, sans Misty's plotline of course.
I find myself pitying her as much as Hitch lately. Him for how much of a goof, dork and butt monkey he was downgraded to. She, for becoming the show's Squidward, or its Frank Grimes to the Mane 5's Homer Simpson. Which would be excusable and able to be laughed off, except, y'know, for the part where the Mane 5 are meant to be likeable, relatable role models, and not the passive-aggressive pushers the writing keeps portraying them as. Something the Snow Pun Intended short from a few days ago encapsulated perfectly.
I think we're in the "Hey, I can get the software to do this" phase of MLP this generation. Where the first season of G4 was stiff in a lot of spots, the animators found all kinds of ways to warp Flash puppets in expressive ways and it became somewhat of an interactive challenge between the writing staff and the animators "Bet you can't do this! Oh, yeah. Look at this. Amazing, but now see if you can do this."
We all win.
An English Man states that stealing art from other lands is wrong:
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I would love to see a full cost breakdown, although there is little chance that will be made public. I get the impression 3D is getting more expensive as expectations of quality keep going up, while as 5700367 says, the 2D teams seem to keep finding new tricks to do cool stuff on low budgets.
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This is it. Posey is the soulmate for all the long suffering parents who try to engage with young people even when it is clearly a lost cause.