Stairs and Elevators · 12:36pm Mar 6th, 2022
I might be running short of things to blog about the New Generation film. But here’s one more observation: Stairs do not seem to exist in G5 Equestria.
We have seen how those industrious earth ponies and tech-savvy pegasi have developed elevators to let any pony move between the floors of their family lighthouse, scale the towers of a high-rise mountain metropolis, and make a stylish entrance to your defence factory floor.
We don’t see so much vertical motion for unicorns, but we can note that Izzy accesses the mezzanine floor of her tree home by running up a smooth ramp, instead of the steps used by Twilight Sparkle in the old Golden Oak (or teleportation).
The Maretime Bay planners have built a very rollerblader-friendly environment with step-free access door-to-door throughout the town. In fact, all across Equestria, where you might expect a row of steps, we instead see a smooth ramp. On the very few occasions when some sort of steps are there, we don’t see any pony use them.
Two thoughts on this:
- Is there a technical reason for this? Is animating quadruped 3D-CGI models walking up or down stairs sufficiently complicated that the production team preferred to design the film to avoid these steps?
- What would Silverstream make of this new world?
Here's hoping the Make Your Mark Special gives enough to tide you over on the G5 science discussion front until September!*
* No, the Tell Your Tale web series will probably not provide much of anything to talk about on this front.
Not much to say on this one. I mean, from a visual design angle I like the design mentality of everything you cited, but that's not the point of this (short) blog, is it?
I wouldn't be too surprised if animation concerns did factor into it. This film did everything in its power to look good on a small budget (I estimate no more than $20 million – animation is expensive, y'all). Primarily, that was done through only building what they absolutely needed, and using shortcuts and tricks otherwise – where Pixar, DreamWorks or Disney would have spent months building sets we see for a few shots, this film often made liberal use of matte paintings. Most of "I'm Looking' Out For You" uses painted backgrounds composited with the immediate foreground elements (though my favourite example of this technique is the shot approaching Izzy's house fro the outside). Otherwise, Zephyr Heights reuses some alleyways and disguises this by redressing the lighting; Maritime Bay has only a few streets used as effective duplication; we usually don't see ponies entering buildings from the outside, meaning the sets are separate. And so forth.
As regards the character animation, it's important to keep that smooth, and they also had to balance that with the "cheats" for them being ponies (notice how the camera is usually placed to obstruct Sunny taking her journal out of her bag?). It would make sense if stairs/steps were scaled back as a consequence of those animations taking marginally longer to do.
Alternatively, they also tried some actions that didn't look good with the anatomical proportions of the 3D ponies (grabbing things in their mouth looked gross, apparently; also the prototype hoof feathers for the pegasi wouldn't animate in a satisfying way). It wouldn't surprise me if horse bodies, even these cutesy pony ones, are not well-proportioned to look 'right' walking down stairs.
Though on the notion of seeing very few steps and none a pony use… we never see a pony going to the bathroom either. Nothing in G4 either (fun fact: there are quite a few early scripts with bathroom scenes, usually teeth-brushing or the like, but they always get cut, not out of malice, but because the scenes in question took a long-protracted way through the episode's plot that was best to simplify for a leaner pace); closest I can think of is hearing running water at a faucet briefly before Sweetie Belle paces back onscreen in "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils". Well, that and Pinkie racing to an outhouse in "The Last Roundup".
Well, there is at least one brief moment where we see the mane 5 walk on a staircase but it's in the middle of "Fit Right In" and it's one of those musical number imagination moments whose diegetic reality is questionable at best. If I had to guess I'd go with animation issues.
In the Great Seapony War of 1753, an Equestria already weakened by internecine divisions was no match for the even the final dying gasps of a failed kingdom like Mount Aris. Yet they came by land, they came by sea, they killed absolutely nopony -- not counting Old Man Worthers, whose poor heart could not take the sight of the hippogriffs coming out of the ocean -- but they took. They took and they took and then, when they had retreated back into the sea to seal their kingdom away for another hundred years, the true depths of their savagery were laid bare before all and sundry.
They'd taken the stairs.
Every last flight of them.
No one really understood why. And so the war was lost to history. Not that ponies really had any shared history at that point. But if they had, this scuffle definitely would have been left out of it.
Apparently it's actually kind of difficult for horses to go down stairs. In contrast to the "cheats" 5641853 mentioned, this may have been something resembling an attempt at proper worldbuilding.
5641853
Interesting points. I can understand cutting the bathroom scenes as when you need to trim the length, they're an easy thing to get rid of. I wonder how many Pinkie Pie mirror jokes we have missed out on. The large number of elevator scenes suggests that maybe these transit bits are important to let us see how everything fits together.
5641854
Yes, that is the most obvious counter example, although as you point you, it's not so much a real staircase as a prancing-on-a-rainbow scene.
5641861
Sounds like this could be part of a Dr Who crossover in which the Daleks come up with sophisticated plan to conquer Equestria.
cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0210/4540/products/punch_cartoon_cards035_1024x1024.png
5641869
I hate how much I like this. XD
Clearly G5 Equestria has strict wheelchair accessibility laws!
I wonder how Sombra would react to the lack of stairs...
Down is the problem for real-world equines. Walking down normal stairs is quite a challenge for them. Very often, on a slope approaching the steepness of a flight of stairs, a horse will sit back on its haunches and slide down, rather than trying to walk with its hooves practically touching its belly. The head-heavy proportions of the G5 ponies doubles the problem. It's not that the animators wouldn't have been able to come up with a physically plausible gait anyway, it's that it would look really weird.
As far as I can recall, G4 stairs weren't all that steep, and I don't remember many scenes where the ponies descended stairs. Celestia did in Sweet and Elite, but her lower legs were hidden by a solid baluster, and her body didn't match the slope of the stairs. Maybe that's why the animators had Twilight fall down one stairwell and slide up (under reverse gravity) another in the Crystal Empire episode.
And look how far they had to stretch Twi's hind leg in that first pic of yours to get her body to be near level! What we might not notice in an abstracted 2D cartoon would be glaring in more "realistic" 3D.
Now I'm really curious. I'll have to be on the lookout for that when I re-watch episodes.
5641868
It does however bring up the important fact that those stairs vanished before even that short scene was over.
Obviously that was not so much a stylistic choice as rather an important bit of lore hidden in plain sight, so from that we can deduce that stairs run counter to the very nature of G5 Equestria and not even the magic of a song montage can sustain them for more than a few seconds.
5642042
Twilight does an impressive job galloping down the crystal empire stairs, while simultaneously discussing plans with Rainbow Dash, in this scene:
static.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/f/fb/Rainbow_'Yeah_and'_S3E2.png
It's a lot easier in 2D.
5642069
Ooh, neat! Thanks! I'll have to go and watch that scene to see how they did it.
At first guess, the stairs look almost orthographic. No perspective and you only need one looped cycle for the legs. Honestly, the more I look into the details of G4's animation, the more I'm impressed with their cleverness as well as their talent.
EDIT: Yep, that was it. They kept Twi's body absolutely still in the shot and scrolled the symmetrical stairs past her. Neat trick!
By happenstance, I paused the vid on a frame that perfectly illustrates the problem quadrupeds have with stairs:
i.ibb.co/6rh0TPS/oooops.jpg
Based on this single frame, what would you guess happens next?
5641865
IIRC, some of the original FiM concept art gave the houses in Ponyville dedicated haylofts. It’s somewhat frustrating watching a series with Pony in its title oscillate between gestures at equine worldbuilding and production teams that clearly have never seen a real horse. One of my favorite images is of a circle of Disney artists surrounding a large bed of straw containing a fawn before they started production on Bambi.
5642042
It’s not just equines but pretty much all ungulates (except for goats) who struggle to descend stairs.
5642401
I truly love when they included equine elements in the show, like how a crowd of ponies applauded by stomping their hooves against the ground. Unfortunately, that only happened once as far as I can recall.
I imagine so, but I have direct (and unfortunate
) experience with horses descending steep slopes, so that's all I felt qualified to assert.
Horses cannot see their hind feet; so now, it is easy to miss steps. Mountain sheep and goats are great at climbing.