), I do love fussing over stats where anything of interest is concerned, Fimfic included. Happily, I’m not alone (because duh My Little Pony: A New Generation – Trailer and Film Thoughts · 7:02pm Aug 12th, 2021
Only 43 days before release too. Oh Netflix. The world of streaming is so much about the here and now…
Thoughts on the trailer, and indeed the film and G5 as a whole, below the break. Spoilers for anything publicly revealed so far.
Outside of one tweet acknowledging the conceptual neatness of fan artist Imalou becoming a lead character designer for this film (and at such a young age too - she's 24 now but was only 21 when the job started!), I have yet to publicly comment on G5 at all. So, this post will include thoughts beyond what's new in the trailer.
The last few seasons of FiM really left an appalling taste. Okay, mostly the last two, but Season 6 & 7 are plenty problematic as well. The newer leads of the show cared only about their new vision, and not about remaining faithful and true to what they inherited. Hence many failed attempts to reboot the cast, indifferent characterisations everywhere, and an agenda-pushing sense that did no one any favours. To say nothing of the poor quality of the writing, even absent those factors.
So, I was quite content to let MLP lie dormant for many years, maybe coming back at the decade's end or something. But, ah, since FiM was so successful, Hasbro's given MLP the Transformers treatment. As an evergreen property now, there'll always be a current toy line and an accompanying commercial show. So, 4 years after the last theatrical MLP movie (better then a 31-year gap, I suppose) and 2 after G4 ended, we already have a new theatrical film. Well, theatrically-intended. Guess you deal with the cards you're dealt with. And hey - given having too many characters was a chief issue in the 2017 movie, a fresh start, where you have full control over the number of characters, could certainly help! And the staff that executed FiM at its end are nowhere to be seen either. And being Irish-animated, I have some personal stakes in the film.
I admit it - the G4 film isn't good. Even setting aside some animation style mishaps and the deluge of characters and celebrity voice stars, the barren story and script's surface-level approach leaves it all rather distant from the viewer. And while making a standalone film was 100% the right call (boy, was the show ever drowning in continuity baggage by then), they arguably went too far, losing many of the show's pleasures, not to mention making it not even feel like it's in the same universe.
BUT - it at least wasn't using the copy-and-paste "2010's babysitter animated kids' film formula". Rather than hanging a mixture of toilet humour, innuendos and pop culture references on a thin plot skeleton, all aimed at different audiences demographics with total contempt for each one, it at least told a straightforward fantasy and friendship quest. One with other problems, yes, but by not treating its audience as deadened automatons, that still made it better than many animated films churned out indifferently by Hollywood every year. All true of the show too - so, so true - but at least that was retained!
You might guess where this is going. Everything revealed about the G5 film since February has made it clearer, and this trailer seals it. With "A New Generation", Hasbro has set out to make a routine kids' CG animated film much like you get a dozen other times every year. Other then being light on toilet humour, innuendos and pop culture references, this trailer is a copycat for any modern animated trailer. All the usual suspects abound - an obnoxious pop song ramping up (I dearly hope the rumours that it's in the film itself prove false); as many quippy lines as can be taken out of context as possible; a deluge of social media-friendly facial expressions, dance poses and meme-y lines, and the general sense that the film is desperate for you to pay attention to it. Far beyond the side effects of trailer editing. After all, even trailers for Pixar films have often being poor. But it's clear this is mostly honest to the film's content.
Now, the trailer is hardly the main indicator of this sense of desperation. The two main signs there were already evident. The voice cast of "young, hip, socially relevant ladies" for the 4 lead mares is as clear a sign of this as anything - I never thought anything would top the Powerpuff Girls reboot there, but this has done it. All the buzzword-y phrases in press releases about Generation Alpha "demanding more emotionally resonant" content, the factory-smell feeling to "making sure it's diverse!", all the things meant to be relevant to today's kids (yes, criticising the smartphones is lazy, but that doesn't stop it from being true - somehow, its far worse here then it was in Zootopia, and it was bad there) - the red flags are strong with this one.
Ah, I should probably cease being vague, and look at the trailer itself.
Believe it or not, it starts out promisingly, with a prologue of the main protagonist as a kid with a parent (whom we almost certainly won't see in the flesh again - Hasbro will leave the death vague, I'm sure) before we cut to them as an adult. This is pure Disney, but justifiably so. It challenges the audience, gets them invested in the character, and seeing our young adult protagonist as a kid just works, plain and simple. Plus, Sunny's child voice is really cute. The decision to make this many years after FiM is appalling, but it's being long-since crystal clear that it's barely going to actually factor into the film's body, so it's only humping the corpse once.
Going standalone and not calling back is 100% the call for the film to make. G4 isn't going anywhere, we've made tons of fan content and are still making much more. We don't need more connections to it. So while that connection is annoying, at least it's barely a thing. Looking to be, anyway. Even if it doesn't change how they could have made the G4 backstory be its own backstory - same events, just without the FiM characters. No other changes needed! But, I digress.
Moving on, seeing how far the racial segregation has progressed in this world, for earth ponies to flee in alarm when Izzy wanders into town… can you tell this film was conceived in the late 2010's, and as a message movie? That said, the "that's not my baby/child" gag, while an ancient one, was one of the few moments in the trailer that didn't leave me in stony silence.
I actually think, even from this trailer alone, that Sunny and Izzy have pretty good chemistry with one another. Which is absolutely not a given when your characters are made up of check-marked, executive-mandated traits. The flashes of them interacting, and setting off on an adventure, produce two other actually fun moments - the bean can squashing is very satisfying, thanks to great texturing and animation of it on the floor, and the cutaway to despondent unicorns is both amusingly startling, and benefits from great visual lighting and atmosphere. Heck, as clichéd a MLP premise it is to be trying to recover lost magic, I don't even mind that.
Sadly, most of the "hip, desperate-to-please" elements intrude onto the trailer's 2nd half. It's been clear for a long while now that the two pegasi princesses (a fact that doesn't seem to inform their characters whatsoever) would be the most desperate-to-please. That extends to the pegasi place, a super-generic Las Vegas-type city (I guess Las Pegasus sets a precedence there), stuffed with social media flashiness ("see, kids, it's just like your world!") but really, it's most evident in Pipp and Zipp themselves. Pipp is a pony pop star way into social media (and her mom is a photo-hungry queen, apparently), and Zipp is just… super bland. There's nothing to her except that which is stated in press releases (apparently she's a scientist as well as an athlete, making her a diluted mash-up of Twilight and Rainbow Dash, then). Kind of fitting that their voice acting is the most subpar, about which I'l have more to say about later.
There's little else to say about the trailer's context, though some of the conceits are neat - they don fake horns to go undercover in the unicorn territory, that could be fun! Though isn't it kind of unfair that only 7 of the characters' voice actors get mentioned? Gee, most animated film actor title cards credit everyone down to characters with ten lines - bit unfair to Phyllis, Alphabrittle (who's in the trailer and has two lines!) and Argyle (also in the trailer). Or, more accurately, their actors.
Moving back off the trailer, at this point, it's best to just rattle through the points to make.
I mentioned the voice acting, didn't I? The 5 smaller characters (one not in the trailer at all, while Ken Jeong's character only yells and face-slams into a wall) aren't present enough to comment on, though Michael McKean and Phil LaMarr* look to be doing fine work, given their limited roles. No, let's stick to the five leads.
Izzy seems, by a wide margin, the best character in almost every facet. Best rendering of the hairstyle, most energetic animation, and easily the most spirited and passionate performance. It helps that Kimiko Glenn is actually an experienced voice actress. There's a mismatch between Hitch's voice and his design, but the voice and acting seem fine - James Marsden is a good actor. As for Sunny, my money's on a passable performance - not the easiest to judge, as the trailer editing for many of her lines is poor - but as much as her voice actor has, typically, made no effort to not sound like it's the late 2010's, the role should give her actual acting to do. These three characters, I can see working at least partially.
The pegasi, though… not only are they the characters with the most obvious "hip for the little kids!" casting choices (one of them is a YouTuber, for goodness sake), but the acting here is properly bad. Not helped by the writing, of course. But Pipp's personality, as exemplified by her dialogue and voice, is exactly the kind of person I put active effort into avoiding in real life, and Zipp is just… the voice fluctuates, which is as good an indicator the "actress" has no handle on her approach to the character. For reference, at the 1:18 mark, Zipp's line has the inflection of forced male raspiness, and then a few moments later, female raspiness. If the pegasi turn out to not be a total washout, colour me surprised.
It's the tone that's the biggest indicator - everything points to at least a partial copy of the Illumination/DreamWorks mode, just without the three-tiered joke categories mentioned as much. But aimed not so much at the bored parents (this film has NO legitimate interest in adults outside of introducing it to their kids, that is abundantly clear). I say partial - being aimed a little younger, and making things clear for the kids, means it will have to slow down at some points, and honestly, the opening act and change of the film, when it's just Sunny and Izzy, before they reach the pegasi place, looks so much better then everything else it's unnerving.
Lacking a good segue, let's just over to the actual visuals and animation. I've done my best to withhold judgment until the trailer, as you need motion to really judge. And here, I have personal stakes - as the first CG animated film in Ireland, and the first major one (with all due apologies to Cartoon Saloon's exemplary work - have to make the indie distributor divide, you know), I really want Boulder Media to succeed here, even if the script, characters and voice acting provided from America crashed and burned.
[EDIT: I forgot that the film's directors, one of them Boulder Media's founder, are also credited on the story, alongside Tim Sullivan, who co-wrote with Gillian Berrow - yes, she continues to be multi-generational for Pony! Now, this story and film still has the feeling of something coming more from executives than the people actually making the film, but clearly Boulder Media weren't totally out of the loop on the creative process. Seems they were more in-the-loop then the 2017 movie, where no DHX filmmakers were involved enough to be credited on Story or Screenplay. Anyway, this means Boulder, for better or for worse, are responsible at least marginally for the story, scenario, plot, characters, all that.]
It's… adequate? Not knowing the budget hinders judgment, but knowing Hasbro, I'd be surprised if this cost above $20 million. For that tier (which includes such ghastly visual misfires as The Star and Sausage Party), it's impressive. The compression of the trailer does a number on the texturing, but the actual environments, props, everything that's not a character, they look really good, and the colours in some places, mostly the forest, visually pop and soothe. If the film slows down to appreciate the beauty at some points, there could be something great there! The art direction itself is, sadly, super generic - Sunny's house looks no different that a human one, the odd detail aside - but even with places like the earth pony square, with bland rectangular motifs, there is a soothing diorama feel. I really loved seeing earth pony trams, and Sunny holding onto the back of one to be pulled along (the "A Netflix film" title mostly obscures it, alas), that leapt out. The generic-ness of the art direction gets more distressing and alarming in the pegasi environments, with the pop social media flashiness, but that's to be expected.
Of course, I highlighted non-character elements for a reason. And not just because in almost every modern CG film, the characters are trickier to nail then the other elements, and usually suffer accordingly - even Disney Animation struggled to get the faces and textures and rendering quite right for a few films, until it magically solved itself in Raya and the Last Dragon. No, it's because, well, there are some problems here.
Not the animation - the actual movement and manipulation of the models is perfectly fine, they're rigged properly, all that. The textures seems low-detail and fuzzy in places (easily the biggest casualty of this being a streaming movie will be the loss in visual quality a cinema screen would have provided), but not distressingly so. But you get used to that. And even with YouTube compression, some feathering and details of the fur and hair are quite lovely.
It's the actual character designs that irk, somewhat. Some things I've made my peace with, like the hard horseshoes of the hooves - it is probably the case that they wouldn't have worked horseshoe-less like in FiM.
The shortage of the DreamWorks face so prevalent in the marketing helps the faces a bit, but it's still the case that, undeniably talented as Imalou is, there's a small but pervasive human-proportioned elemens to the faces of her character designs. The particular way the eyes, snout, and mouth share space is just uncomfortable and off-putting, more so on some characters - Izzy gets away mostly unscathed. I do respect the decision to marginally shy away from the "same exact body" style of G4, giving marginal difference to all of the leads' faces. But, I have a special degree of rage for the artist/modeller that gave Zipp narrow-slanted eyes, but didn't adjust her facial proportions to match accordingly (think long and hard about why they would want said character to have narrow slanted eyes). Almost every face she makes is a trip to the Uncanny Valley. Compared to her, everyone else gets off scot-free.
In short, the visual look is a mixed bag, through a combination of highs and lows. I take great pleasure in knowing the lows (generic art direction in places, design aspects of the characters) are design choices, not technical visual issues. All the people working directly on the actual visuals we see onscreen? Far less to be ashamed of. Again, very impressive for its budget - place this next to Despicable Me 3 or the forthcoming Sing 2, and it comes quite close, and they have budgets of $80+ million. Still, it would have been better (okay: might have) had they gone more cartoon-y, a lá Captain Underpants, rather than the de facto CG realism in everything but the level of caricature. Not that I would expect a bold visual move like that from Hasbro on this property.
I've barely touched on the uncomfortable racial segregation plot angle, because there is little to say. The trailer makes it abundantly clear that the film will, as a little kids' film, gloss right over any dark, troubling elements in favour of being bright, bubbly and poppy, which is good in a sense. Though it makes it all the clearer how invasive and crudely-inserted such an element is.
This thoughts piece has gotten far too long, so to make a long story short - there are parts about the film and trailer I like. Izzy seems to be a character that works; everything in the film before reaching the pegasi place looks passably entertaining; having a prologue with Sunny as a child is obvious but brilliant (it's MLP, doesn't matter if it's predictable if it works); and the voice acting, once you shake out the terrible performances for Pipp and Zipp, isn't bad, though it clearly won't hold a candle to G4's exquisite voice performances. Even Izzy, by far the best here, would be only a moderately good performance placed in FiM. The film keeping itself to less characters is a great step, and it is bold enough to make some ponies more important than others, rather than straining to make them all evenly important. Portions of the plot, like the heist, looking like they could be promising. And aspects of the visuals do work, and are impressive, especially for what I'm sure is not a budget above $20 million. Pity we have to deal with YouTube and Netflix compression - pray for a Blu-Ray release, given a theatrical one's out the window!
All this is enough for the trailer, and film, to be marginally better then I would have thought this morning. Seriously.
But those pale in comparison to all the other red flags. The stench of being hip and relatable to little kids is hard to waft off, so thick is it; the racial segregation setup is alarming and conceptually abysmal, and will date the film far worse then the modern, current voice performances will; the characters' personalities, even omitting the two pegasi, are clearly going to be thin and mostly market-driven, not holding a candle to the wonderful, captivating characters from FiM that got us so invested; the voice performances of the two pegasi are so bad as to deserve their own point; the art direction is generic and the character designs have problems, mostly in the faces, and ESPECIALLY the Uncanny Valley feel for Zipp, giving her narrower eyes without adjusting the face to match. The jokes, with a few exceptions, feel bland and little different than any other animated film, and I'd be surprised if I don't spend most of my time with the film in stony silence. And, of course, connecting this to G4, though likely to have little bearing on the film, is such an abysmal and poor decision, undoing the happy ending there just as badly as the Disney Star Wars trilogy did, among other things. Least it'll be mostly ignorable in the film.
Obviously this film has no interest in capturing the interest of a 27-year-old ghost. But that hasn't stopped said ghost from enjoying other content that had no interest in his opinion after all. Not really so here…
Oh, no idea what the musical numbers will be like, excepting the possibility of that obnoxious pop song being one of them. I don't expect much, frankly. As nothing has been said there past the songwriters, we'll just have to see.
I cannot stress this enough - were it not for the brand name, this film wouldn't hold anyone's attention for long and would be indistinguishable from any cookie-cutter animated film you get every year, though aimed a little younger. I expect this to be bad, but not outrageously so, and with some compensating factors, and quickly forgettable. Which still gives it a fighting chance of sailing over large chunks of FiM's last few seasons!
Those positive points I listed above are as clear an indicator as any that I WANT to like this film. If you've read this far, you know I've thought my points through carefully, and am as far from nitpicking and ranting as is possible. Certainly, I would not have devoted this much effort to analysing this if I didn't want to like the film, no?
And as made by an animation studio in Ireland, how could I not want to root for the home team? Based on this evidence, I can bat for a fair shake of visual aspects, especially on the expected budget. But not a whole lot more.
Over 3,000 words on this! This'll probably be my last word on this film publicly until it comes out. I'll see it, probably sit through it in mostly stony silence, enjoy some mild compensating factors, and then shelve it away in my mind, sticking to the first half and change of FiM once again. The G4 film came and went with barely a whimper of an impact on the fandom - even if this is a reboot and brings far more new elements to engage fans with, the fandom is even smaller, so I predict a similar outcome. And the shrill, vapid, "desperate-to-be-socially-relevant" feel here can't hold an adult's interest for long. But what else is new?
* Seriously, how did a professional voice actor who's primary gig is voice acting (Kimono Glenn is at least young enough to be relevant on social media, and does a fair share of on-camera work, it's where she got her start) stumble their way into this cast? His character looks to be minor, and not give him much to work with. But I'm seriously curious to see how he fares in the role. Seems fine from the trailer, anyway!
