Review of Equestria Girls and Why It Doesn't Disapoint Our Disapointment. · 11:13am Oct 4th, 2015
I like Equestria Girls. Rainbow Rock's was awesome, and the first movie was okay. The last movie, however, wasn't very good. And I think I know why.
First a mini review of Friendship Games:
Friendship Games was not an improvement on Rainbow Rocks and I think there is a very clear reason why. It suffered from Oh Hey, Let's Make This a TV Show syndrome (abbreviated OHLMTTSS, pronounced omelets, and completely made up by me so I can pronounce it however the hell I want thanks to the creator of GIFs pronouncing them JIFs). It also seemed to be plagued by sequelism (the act of making a movie or tv show to set up another movie or tv show that is related or it exists because it relates to another movie or TV show and for no other reason). I don't know if that's a thing but that's how I think about it and if the studio isn't going to put in time to make their movie good why should I put time into describing it.
The writing seemed like it should have gone through several more drafts before being touched up becuase the writing felt like it existed soly to get us through the movie. It didn’t move the audience, it didn’t challenge anything, it didn’t try to be for than filler and it honestly reminded me of Naruto filler, only with less action or relivance to anything. It simply existed to get Twilight into the group.
The animations were okay most of the time, and a few were decent, but other than the climax they didn't really feel that good. Ponies constantly pushes itself to be a little better each season, if not each episode, but this didn’t. And really even the climax felt a little 'meh' compared to anything 'epic' that they've done before.
I did note that some of the voices sounded more grown up, which was a nice touch, but it was to little to pull the show through.
There was also a lot of stupidity, and not the fun in-character stupidity that some shows have. I mean the ‘just talk to a person’ stupidity that makes the characters seem extremely reaction based with no motivations of their own. If they had just tried a few things they might have found a solution or worked toward something. But no, Twilight who created a device to detect magic does nothing more than follow it around. Even Sunset repeatedly stated that she felt like she needed to find the problem, but then did nothing about it. This is completely against the lore they set up for her as a character which focused on her going out into the world and growing from experience in contrast to Twilight’s preference for book learnin’. There was a lot of stupidity that existed so the plot would work a certain way, when clearly working stupidity into being true to a character or believable in a culture is better. It would have been easy to work a few plot points around to have made more sense
And the music was disappointing, which was disappointing.
Oh, The humanized Cadance looked like the bird from Five Night's at Freddie's without the beak and was pink instead of yellow. I got a vaguely hispanic vibe from cadence in a way I don't actually know how to describe so it might just be me. (Tangent: at least if she was hispanic then maybe she would speak one of the romance languages) There was a cute little scene where she and shining armor were giving each other lover's eyes in the background, but not a whole lot was happening in the background of that movie so this stands out more because of it’s uniqueness than it’s quality.
Now, here is why I think Equestria Girls has a problem. It's hard to care about almost all of the characters. Why is this?
Well, in MLP the characters have clearly defined goals and opinions, things they don't like, challenges that they face regularly like Rarity's workload or applejack keeping the farm a runnin.' But when they went to Equestria Girls it feels like they just took the characters from the show, and made them human without changing anything else.
The problem with that is that things don't relate.
AJ is in school, not working daily on her farm. She isn't coming from a hard day's work so little touches like being a bit tired, or having specific tasks to do are gone. Instead she has nebulous chores which are undefined. In MLP she has actually defined them. There is no detail to her character and, quite honestly, I can't actually remember if she lives on a farm in Equestria Girls. I mean, I assume she does but you wouldn't know it unless she stated that she lives on a farm which is about as lazy as she can get. I know she and Big Mac brought cider to school once but that almost seems shoved in as a reference to cider which has played such a crucial part to her stories in MLP and happens to be popular.
Pinkie is the exact same as well, only she may or may not have a job. I think she works at Sugar Cube Corner, but unless you see her working there or she says it you wouldn't know.
Rarity makes clothes, but why? I mean, sure it's her hobby but does she just spend thousands of dollars on materials, combine them with hundreds of hours of work, and then give them away? If this is the case how can she afford it? Perhaps she part of a club that get's funding, but I expect we will never know.
Twilight from Friendship Games is just constantly picked on, more so than Fluttershy ever was, and she is seemingly afraid of everyone at some point. Why? Because plot that's why. No, seriously. She is completely different from the Twilight in MLP. Yeah, sure, Princess Twilight has had a few more experiences and wasn't ever super personable. But let's compare Twilight from Season one
Twilight was awkward, she made some mistakes, but she was also proud, no nonsense, and driven to be the best student she could be. Even as a child Twilight had a purpose and that purpose was learning.
In Equestria Girls Twilight's purpose in nebulous research which somehow translated into researching magical energies. Oh, but she's bad at that as evidence from the fact that her device measures energy. That’s it. she mentions research, and created a device that measures energy. She spends the rest of the movie running around following energy signatures and has no other plan, no understanding of the situation she is in. No one asks to spend time with her like in the show, they just ignore her or put her down. If we did not have a reference, and some vaguely similar characteristics, then we have a character with no motivations other than to get into a school, but no reason for her to want to get into a school after she graduates. It’s like wanting to be on a sports team but not having a reason to be on a sports team.
Now, you might try and excuse Twilight in EQ by saying she isn't mentored by a princess. This is true. However no one else is different at all so why is she? It's a contrast of Extremes. First, absolutely everyone in the human world is as identical in personality as possible to their MLP counterparts, but then Twilight is only nerdy in both MLP and EQ and even then it's completely different type of nerdy. Nothing else seems the same.
Now with Fluttershy they put in a modicum of effort. She volunteers at a shelter. That's it, that's all she had to do to have her own identity between EQ and MLP. She hands out flyers, she carries animals around and talks about the shelter, and the shelter comes up in conversation naturally. Is it functionally the same as in the TV show? Yes! But it has been adapted and realized and worked in to naturally fit within a larger, if incomplete, world
It's the only real instance of the writers taking a pony character and adapting them to the human world in a personalized fashion.
Now, I hear what you might be saying. "But Piquo, Rainbow Dash has her sports?" Yeah. She plays sports. Only she has no goals in life surrounding those sports. She sports because she is sporty and they needed a sport to show how she sports better than anyone else sports. They have no other way of making her awesome so they said athleticism = sports. I think that's BS, they could easily have given her a goal that pushes her forward like they do in MLP.
Imagine if she had a focus. It wasn’t just nebulous sports, though she could always participate in sports behind her larger goal. That what happens in the Tv show and that’s one of the things that makes her great. She’s lazy, she sleeps a lot, she doesn’t like to work all that much, but when she does something physical she tries to do it well. That part of the character in EQ is still there, but I say there is no reason for it.
In the TV show Rainbow Dash has a goal, all the characters do and a lot have even succeeded. Pinkie just wants to make ponies happy. applejack just wants to work on her farm. Fluttershy want’s to take care of her animals and, I fell, she wants to grow a little braver. Rarity wanted, and eventually achieved, a premier shop in Canterlot. She is one one of the best and at some point she has realized the dream of being acknowledged as such. Twilight wanted to be Celestia’s student, the best she could be, but she has grown beyond that to being an Equal to her Idol. It’s a rare treat in American TV for a character to exceed their goals and while I think it could have been done better, I applaud them for the arc as a whole.
And then we have Rainbow Dash. In the show she want’s to be a Wonderbolt, in the movie she.. Well… she wants to sport the best sport that she can sport. She has no goals other than maybe a holding pattern, and it kills her character. Imagine if they had given her something. Maybe she wants to be a gold medal olympic athlete. Or perhaps a motocross legend. I could even see her wanting to become a famous gymnast with tricks and routines. But we have learned nothing about her in three movies other than she sports well.
That's about every "main" character other than Sunset, and she is the only "main" character that they made from scratch. How does she do? Well she has a purpose. In the first movie it was to steal the crown and use the magic to conquer Equestria. Yeah, they could have given her a bit more of a reason to do it but there is a reason that the first movie isn't the most popular portrayal as Sunset. In Rainbow Rocks her motivation is to explore friendship, help herself by getting others to accept her, and to better herself. It’s a movie where she is both exploring in self discovery and trying to stop someone from hurting her friends and performing one helps her with the other. In the third movie she wants to... um... stop magic from going crazy I guess. I mean, if there was a motivation to her as a person I think it would be to be the magical knowledge expert to fulfill the expectations of herself and others. Unfortunately if that was what they were going for they didn't do a good job because everyone blindly just accepts that she will fix it and it's just a matter of time. This, incidentally, is aggravating because no one knows anything about her capabilities. They have never actually seen her do or use magic or solve magical problems. She is just a good person who knows something about magic they couldn't hope to understand and therefor "she got dis."
That’s the big problem with Equestria Girls, the writers didn’t take time to make characters or the world, they just recycled what they had in MLP and added finders. Then when they were forced to change it, they just went with the first idea that went into their heads rather than taking the time to adapt the characters and the world properly. I mean, there is a reason that Miss Cheerilee is still a teacher but others her age are teens and the kids are still kids and Granny Smith is the lunch lady. They didn’t want to use the time, money, or effort to do it properly and the IP suffers for it.
We suffer for it.
Our collective WIFUs suffer for it.
#Cadanceisbestscarybird
Well piquo pie i could not agree more than what you just mention. Rainbow rocks is by far a better movie than friendship game.
You see a little bit of their outside lives in the shorts. For example, in one Sunset and Applejack are at a farm and there is a horse.
But yes, no references in the movie.
I do totally agree about the characters. I was having this conversation with Titanium Dragon on my blog the other day, when I was talking about the humanized story I wrote. He was saying that you can't have a character like Rainbow Dash without the Wonderbolts. I disagree; the important thing about Rainbow Dash is that she's active and strives for a near impossible goal, which she has a chance of achieving based on natural talent combined with determination. That's what her episodes represent when they involve the Wonderbolts, so that's what she needs for her character as we've grown to love her to make sense.
Applejack needs for her family to depend on her for their financial success (along with a pride in that role,) and I would argue she needs her relationship to Apple Bloom. Twilight needs academic curiosity that overrides everything else; when she met the girls in Friendship Games, the chance to study magic first hand should have come before even her own academic future (in the first episode of the show she gets her assignment from Celestia out of the way as quickly as possible so she can get back to research.) Pinkie needs her ability to build a relationship with everyone she meets and desire to make them happy, something they fell down on in the first EqG because plot railroading. Rarity, similar to Rainbow Dash, need an ambition she's working towards in a cutthroat industry. Fluttershy needs a safe place with animals to take care of that she needs to be coaxed away from.
If you look at motivations instead of trappings, you can put the characters anywhere and they make sense. If you ignore those motivations, you lose the complexity of the characters. EqG has none of that complexity for the mane six, while Sunset's motivations are natural to that setting, so she comes across as a much more interesting character.
Couldn't agree more! For me, the EQG movies took everything I liked about MLP and threw it out the window. The trade-offs are appalling:
• A cool magical world where almost anything can happen becomes a High School surrounded by generic townscape.
• Mysterious immortals with god-like powers become low level administrators.
• A wide range of characters with varying interests, talents, and ages all become High School students or employees.
• Unexplored territory, ancient lore, and terrifying monsters become bus routes, homework, and... well... no monsters. (Except for the ones imported from the more interesting dimension.)
• Charming and cute character designs become ugly stick-insects. (If you haven't yet seen it, check out the animatic for the song they cut: The artists drew really nicely proportioned characters... not to mention the song was better than all the ones that made it into the movie.)
So yeah... not a fan. And... a thought just struck me. In mythology monsters are often banished to Hell, Tartarus, or the Underworld. Stratswirl banished the sirens to...? Hmn....
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I think that's one of the reasons FOE was so popular. We could see the world turning sour after the fact but it happened because the characters followed their motivations. A shame that DHX was probably afraid to change the characters in any way and so didn't try to adapt the characters.
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Ah, the shorts. I avoided those to avoid potential spoilers.
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Yes, but he could have sent them to Tartarus and didn't. It's possible they could have broken out somehow. But then again, they could have walked through the mirror to get back and didn't. Maybe they didn't know how, but again they just don't seem to think it through that well.
If I may with Twilight being a doormat there's actually a pretty simple explanation for that
If we look back at when we see Twilght as a filly she is shy, during her magic exam she's clearly stressed, nervous and after she goes all super sayian and gets brought back to reality she panics because she's afraid to get scolded. However, the difference is in her mentor, Celestia. Think about it for a second, Celestia, atleast as a teacher is shown in both versions to be very patient, kind, supportive and encouraging of all her students. She isn't the type to scold or lecture a student when they make a mistake and when they do well she is encouraging, but also doesn't show outright favortism. She also encourages her students to be proactive and explore as many possible options as they can, very rarely ever being even remotely harsh to them.
Having someone like that as your personal instructor obviously made Twilight more confident and less shy, we even see this during the Flashback with Moondancer. She's been at the school for a while and isn't even remotely withdrawn anymore, sure her social skills still suck but now she isn't afraid to outright act or speak to other people without being afraid of the potential backlash. This mindset is shown in her as an adult, she's dedicated and focused on her research, but at the same time is also anti-social though not because she's afraid of interacting with people, she is just more interested in reading and studying then anything else.
Now take Equestria girls Twilight or Sci-Twi so to speak. Magic doesn't exist in this world and schools work considerably different, yet one thing that is the same is expectations. Schools in our world can and often do put a lot of pressure on students to succeed, especially the intelligent ones, effectively hammering it in that they are destined for great things but only if they are pushed hard. With Twilight's intelligence she'd obviously go to extremely expensive or simply private schools, where that mindset is cranked up to eleven and teachers focus more on grades than interaction. In fact if Twilight was at Crystal Prep for several years, then her withdrawn personality makes even more sense. Think about it, heres someone whose already social awkward and shy, being shoved into a school full of ultra competitive students and teachers, with Cinch pretty much being like a military general expecting nothing but perfection, with every failure being treated as a huge, potentially life destroying crisis, and achievements of excellence being simply expected instead of applauded.
Taking all of that into account, Sci-Twilight being so socially withdrawn and acting like a wall flower makes perfect sense....Then again maybe I'm just overthinking it.
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Your stated differences apply, but the biggest difference is that one is the personal protege of the land's god-emperor, while the other one isn't. The rest of the Mane 5 aren't as different in personality from their pony counterparts because none of them diverge due to such a huge influence.
Pony Twilight is extremely entitled. She's a genuinely nice pony n' all, but Canterlot Privilege is pouring out her nostrils.