My Early Thoughts on the My Little Pony Movie (before seeing) · 11:32pm Oct 6th, 2017
post note: I really need to learn how to blog. Hardly any of the embeds I used worked the way I wanted them to.
If you've ever happened to see me on Equestria Daily on the rare occasion I feel inclined to make a post there, you may well already know how I feel about the series these days. However, for the longest time I had held out hope that the movie would be G4's best chance to revitalize this series with some fresh new ideas. This does seem to be the hope from a lot of bronies and from Hasbro, but looking at the trailers I see problems.
The good things I see in the trailers really aren't that good. The animation is decent looking but not quite cinema quality and certainly nothing all that impressive even at the movie's budget. We were always told from the staff that the budget for the film would be low and I'd assumed that they meant somewhere around $20 million. I was already prepared to go easy on the animation until I heard that the budget was actually $40 million. Wow I thought, they should be enough to at least do SOMETHING impressive with the animation with that kind of money behind them, and then I saw the long list of celebrities attached to the film and I went, "...oh"
Well, character movement is pretty smooth and the environments look a bit more lifelike than the show at least in terms of their looking like 3D spaces you can actually walk around in. Unfortunately, the poor blending of the 2D and 3D elements makes the overall aesthetic of the film arguably worse than the overall aesthetic of the TV show. The thinner outlines of the characters help to better define their shapes which goes a long way toward helping with this blending problem but it's not enough.
When you look at this clip of the ponies running on the wooden scaffolding (the gif is garbage quality so you might try finding a higher quality video with this clip) it doesn't really look like their hooves are actually hitting the platform as they run. It also doesn't really look like the characters are moving as quickly as their legs are moving. I'm not sure how to deal with this problem as there isn't much discussion on how to blend 2d animation with 3d animation properly. Even Disney struggled to do this back when they were still trying it. I have a few ideas though.
I'm pretty sure it's all in how detailed the character movement is. The animators need to decide where a character's hoof will be touching the platform and keep it there until their hoof leaves it. I can tell they were using a generalized run cycle to save time but when working in a 3d environment they need to be extremely precise. If there's a line right next to a character's hoof (or foot), like say the line delineating the next floorboard, I shouldn't be able to perceive a difference in the placement of the character's hoof relative to that line when it's on the ground from one frame to the next.
Fluttershy's back leg starts out touching the line I drew on the image.
In the next frame her leg seems to have slid back a few inches.
Same thing with Rarity.
It might also help to give the characters more weight as they move. Again, not being an animation expert, I can't really explain the difference between weightless character movement and weighted character movement except to say that when you animate a character in motion you have to consider how the character deals with their own weight as they move. The style the animators went for in the character designs shouldn't require the characters to display 100% accurate physics, but with the more solid looking 3d environments that the characters are moving around, their bouncy cartoonish-ness may be a little jarring.
Now I've talked before about how the 3d art gives the environments a more solid look such that one can more easily picture themselves walking around in them. Looking at shots of the new Canterlot and comparing them to the show my first thought was, "Wow, they actually included the city this time."
The Canterlot of the film looks more like an actual city whereas with the Canterlot in the show you only see the Castle, and yet there's somehow still a city around it whenever we visit Canterlot, complete with a stadium in fact.
And yet the city has never looked more dull. The ground has no texture, I can't even tell whether or not the path to the upper city is supposed to be stairs or a ramp. They didn't even give the buildings in this shot shingles the way they did in this other shot.
And of course when I say shingles, I mean barely visible blotches suggesting shingles.
And of course there's a departure from the movie's own art style in the designs of the non-equestrian characters that I see people bringing up all over the place, the worst offender being probably capper. I will say that I don't have a huge problem with this, I see many people saying that the show doesn't use fully anthropomorphic characters but what about Diamond Dogs. Capper's not much further anthropomorphized than they are. Not to mention that this movie is taking place "outside of Equestria" so while not a point in the movie's favor, the new characters aren't enough to ruin the movie for me.
What I think is probably the biggest problem with the animation is the floating characters phenomenon that seems to permeate the film, probably due to the lack of detail in the environments. The characters are standing on the rocky floor of a cave right? Where are the rocks, the cracks in the floor, the dirty uneven surface? Why does the cave floor look like impossibly fine concrete?
There are things I like about the animation though. The new program they're using makes for way more dynamic character movement. When I look at animation from the movie I get the impression that the character's facial expressions aren't just reused presets like in most scenes in the show but that they are unique to each frame. As a plus, though low in detail the environments may be, the movie still manages to have some strikingly beautiful shots.
Overall the film looks spectacular in spite of it's low budget made worse by how difficult 2D animation is for studios nowadays.
Now that I've spent far too much time nitpicking something I was already planning to go easy on (the animation) we'll move on now to the story. From what I've seen the story doesn't have me all that thrilled, and the more I see the less confidence I have for this film. Many people have tried to compare this film to the Angry Birds movie which I don't think is a very apt comparison. All it really has in common is that they feature a villainous invading force and that the main characters leave to find help. In the MLP movie the villains pursue the protagonists whereas In Angry Birds the villains don't, in fact they don't even stay in the village they invaded and the angry birds don't even find help. While one may point out that the two films share roughly the same structure with the invasion of the villains at the start of the film and a counter invasion by the protagonists at the end of the film, being that vague you could say both films are a ripoff of Red Dawn, or any invasion movie for that matter.
I do think, however, that this story does seem rather shallow. In every trailer I've watched I haven't seen anything resembling a character arc for any of the main characters. They all seem to have been boiled down to their most basic surface level character traits. Rarity is vain and obsessed with beauty, Pinkie Pie is happy all the time (even when running for her life from baddies or plunging to her probable death), Fluttershy is nice but easily frightened, I haven't even seen any lines from Applejack I don't think she'll have much to do, Rainbow Dash is "Mrs. Awesomeness Mare", and Twilight Sparkle will probably be the one with the closest thing to a character arc of anyone in the movie, or at least out of the main cast. Spike's probably going to be the same gag character he normally is.
I'm actually expecting that the movie will instead focus more of developing its new "Non- Equestrian" characters. Captain Celaeno seems to be a down-on-her-luck pirate ship captain who just needs a little bit of encouragement from the ponies to really shine. There's not a lot to go on with Capper but I'm guessing he'll probably be the shady-but-moral-cool-cat-with-all-the-connections who'll probably decide to help the ponies after they impress him or interest him in some way, he may even learn a friendship lesson if the movie has time. Tempest will quite obviously be the Villain who's not "really" a bad person, she just had trouble getting over some childhood trauma and needs to be shown the light of friendship again. Gruber, typical villain sidekick, he'll serve as the cheerleader for whatever the villain is doing, he may potentially have a change of heart near end of the film but its possible that he won't. His attempts at comedic relief have so far left me unimpressed, his love of food is a particularly dull cliche. The Storm King will most likely be a rather shallow villain with no clear motive other than power. He did kind of surprise me with his appeal being somewhat heavily focused on comedy as opposed to plain intimidation, but it seems his comedic genius won't stretch far beyond shouting about how "EVERYTHING'S TOO CUTE!"
And now the seaponies. I almost forgot about the seaponies. So, what about those seaponies? Well, for starters, they're apparently called merponies in this film. They'll pretty much have much the same "arc" that the pirate parrots have in this film, something bad happened to them in the past and the've gone into hiding, the ponies show up and after a little bit of convincing the merponies decide to step back out of the shadows (become hippogryphs again) and help the ponies take back Canterlot. Princess Skystar is going to be the happy and energetic one and Queen Novo's going to the sassy snarky one. Merponies are the mandatory toy insert that the whole story is written to promote, just looking at the scene where the Queen Novo turns the main characters into merponies and they're like "Yay, awesome, we're seaponies now, WoHoo!!!" instead of being like "Oh my god what have you done to us!" or even just, "Woah, it's so weird being in a new body," like any normal person would be... well... It's just typical of writing driven by marketing. I'm hoping the scene doesn't play out quite the way it seems to in the trailers.
This post has taken me much longer to make than I hoped it would. As of this post the film has already come out and reviews of it are looking to be lukewarm to positive with a few harsher opinions here and there. All in all, the film appears to be getting about a 2/3 positive reception, which is good.It's about the best I could've hoped for after seeing the trailers. Keep in mind that a lot of these reviewers are people who don't watch the show. The fact that it's managed to even mildly impress a few people from outside of the show's audience is a good sign.
This isn't meant to be a scathing review of the film. I'm just posting a some of my impressions about the film from the way it was marketed. I had some doubts about the film that I wanted to voice but I didn't want my opinions to get mixed in with other people who had negative reactions that seemed to be based in knee jerk reactions, unreasonably high standards for the animation, and desperation to be right about the falling quality of the series. While I wouldn't disagree that the series has declined there are people who are letting their opinion of the series color their perception of the movie to the point of delusionality. I even saw someone say that Sailor Moon looked better than the movie even in episode 170 (its worst looking episode), claiming that the animation was "fluid" and that it had "great backgrounds" before posting THIS gif.
... Yep. Someone actually posted that... and they weren't even joking.
At this point I've actually seen the film. I've been working on a review of it but progress has been slow. I had been hoping to get it out before the movie released on blu-ray but life's kinda getting in the way and I'm starting to loose interest in the project. I'll try to get it done as soon as I can. Won't be doing any of the fancy stuff I tried here with the gif and image embeds but it'll hopefully be better written than this post... if it ever gets done.
