My Little Pony: The Movie Mini-Review · 6:39am Oct 9th, 2017
So, I saw the movie. My thoughts on it are a bit jumbled, so I'll just try to give a short, spoiler-free version.
You've probably heard it everywhere else, so I'll confirm it: The movie completely ignores various established characters that would have been very beneficial to the main characters. They don't try to get help from Discord, Ember, Thorax, or anyone else they're on reasonably good terms with that have pretty powerful forces at their command. And no explanation whatsoever is offered. One could try to excuse it by saying that the film just takes place earlier in the series before they met Ember or Thorax, as I didn't see anything offhand that would require it to be later than season 4 (still need an explanation for Discord, though), but I read that apparently it's between seasons 7 and 8, so that's out.
Still, that aside, how is the movie on the whole? It's... okay. There's a number of smaller issues I have with it that I could discuss, but for brevity's sake I'll say the single biggest issue is this: I found it very rushed. It feels like the whole thing could have been a half-season-long story arc to better develop things that are just rushed through. In particular, both the movie-specific allies and the antagonists could have used a lot more time to develop them. I would've liked to see this expanded into a half season of the show (I don't think it could sustain a full season, but 10-13 episodes seems reasonable).
So, bottom line, is it worth seeing? Well, despite being so problematically compressed, I still thought it was okay. Not great, but okay. This was one of those films that was fine, but left me disappointed because I felt it could have been so much better than it was because, again, of how rushed I felt some aspects of it were. I don't think my time watching it was misspent, though I'm not sure I'd recommend paying full price for a ticket. If you're wondering, you're not going to get anything out of this film if you're not already a fan. Then again, I'm not sure why you'd be reading this if you weren't.
Of course, thanks to Friendship Is Absurd, I couldn't watch the movie without constantly thinking of ways to possibly warp it in Friendship Is Absurd, but at my current rate it'll probably be quite a while before I finally get around to reaching it. And, speaking of which, the next chapter will be out soon... hopefully.
I thought it was kinda weird, too. You see Starlight and Trixie in the movie for half a second in a montage near the beginning, and half another second in the credits. There was also a balloon Discord in the beginning, and his silhouette during the credits.
As for why they didn't get help from anyone else... they got thrown out of Canterlot. And their only clue was to get help from the "Queen of the Hippo-". I'd imagine it's more of a "This plot makes it so that the only option is this and that" thing than a "So many options are available right now; might as well pick the most arbitrary one!" or something of the like.
But yeah, there was a joke they missed out on. The plot twist is that the Hippo- are actually the Hippogriffs, but it would've been even cooler if they called themselves Hippocamps after turning aquatic.