My Little Pony: The Movie: What I Think

Yeah, I failed horribly at writing about episodes. I'm also horrifically behind on the show (haven't even finished Season 6! Good grief.) I'll catch up. But, whatevs, didn't need to see all that to see the mane event.

So, yeah, the movie.

Brief thoughts: It was fun, but not that great. The animation was excellent but fails in some areas. There's some good stuff to be pulled out of the movie, but otherwise... eh.

Okay, so. Longer thoughts.

Let's start with the animation, because it's a thing people have been going bonkers over. The overall quality of the animation is, actually, quite remarkable. It's impressive! It's very clear they put a lot of work into it an the change in animation works very well, for the most part. Except in some areas. For one, I'm... not the most thrilled about the change in pony mouths. They came off as a bit weird at points. And I'm also not happy about the change in wing flaps. It was an improvement for pegasi but the alicorn wing flaps actually looked worse. Weaker.

So, the story. The story was all right. It's a movie for kids, so I won't be too harsh, but let's be honest - nearly every beat of the story was very, very predictable. The only thing that wasn't completely so was the Hippogryfs. I'm not thrilled at them totally Worfing Celestia, Luna, and Cadance out of the gate, again. The Storm King was underwhelming at best. The portrayal of most of the characters... I'll get to that. I did like Tempest, though.

I actually really liked Tempest. I've seen complaints that she's yet another Twilight foil, and that's true. It tends to happen because Twilight is nominally the main character of the series and has been since the beginning. And she definitely was for the movie. Tempest was neat and we finally get a good look at what happens with broken horns.

And that leads to another thing - the world-building from this movie is fantastic. We got to see more species - a bunch more - from anthro cats to fish people to whatever the Storm King's goons were. And hippogryfs! More area past Equestria, a better look at parts of Canterlot that aren't the castle, you get the iddea. It's great! Although the scope of travel made Equestria seem super, super tiny.

Anyway, let's talk about the portrayal of the characters. In particular, the Mane 6. Oh my god. Pinkie was okay, but was damn close to basically being the main character, as much spotlight hogging as she did. Fluttershy was was afraid of flying again and effectively just background decoration. Applejack wasn't much better. The number of times Spike was used as a portable flamethrower (and otherwise did not have much use or purpose in the story) was ridiculous. Rarity was okay but entirely non-essential. Thise whole movie could have been done with Twilight, Pinkie, and Rainbow Dash, and nothing would have been lost. That's bad. That's really bad.

I did like most of the new characters, but outside of Tempest, they didn't really have enough time to breathe and exist, except maybe the cat. That said, the Storm King was just utterly underwhelming. He was a knock-off Tirek with less power, less presence, and poor attempts at humor. All he did was be slightly goofy, be very slightly menacing, wave his stick around to mess with the sun and moon, and provide Twilight with an opportunity to do her friendship hero thing with Tempest. That's it. And that's just damn disappointing.

The songs were good and fun and I like Tempest's. This is not a surprise, I like the vast majority of pony music and I have a love affair with villain songs. I don't have much to say here, I'm not really good at music critiques or anything.

Brief Edit: I'll probably have more I want to say later, but for now, this is enough.