My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) · 4:26am Oct 25th, 2017
This year has gone by quickly and I've found myself in a funk for most of it. Things like movies and what not haven't excited me. Writing has been difficult for a number of reasons. I don't consider it a block but it just became a chore to even want to open up a word file and type something. Therefore I started doing other things along the way. I learned to play a very poor version of Smoke on the Water and took pictures of the sun during the eclipse.
I found my copy of Poultrygeist ... a movie I thought had been stolen yet there it was sitting on a table like it had been there the whole time. The movies I did watch brought me little to no joy. Rogue One which I'd liked initially steadily made me angry and while John Wick 2 was a nice time on Valentine's day Skull Island was terrible and so continued the ups and downs of day to day life, none of it major just most of it a load of meh.
September rolled around and off to Dragoncon I went with moonshine, a box of MRE's, two bottles of whiskey, two other people and a little bang bang. Most of the convention was okay. I spent time watching people beat on one another with swords, saw some pro wrestling, saw Psychostick, Bella Morte, American Murder song and some other band in concert. Got kicked out of the room and ended up in a shuttle that went to the not so great side of town where we picked up these freaked out women who were being pursued by a guy who had a apparently. Then swung by the hospital for a different reason. Eventually got an art book from Andy Price who apparently lives around here now. Good times.
Last week I got my head split open by a metal door. I got mad and then kicked the door. picked the piece of me off its corner and chucked it before clocking out for lunch and going home to do some brief medical work and then went back in. Periodically the wound would weep but whatever. I had things to do. It's all okay now.
For a year of not a whole lot happening I guess some things did stand out. That's sort of the way journeys are though you go through things and you don't think about them until you actually sit there and do so. Speaking of journeys apparently the denizens of Equestria decided to make their way to the theater in October.
First however, there is a short movie about some girl who looks like she's from the game Animal Crossing who plays with disembodied bunny heads and has some weirdo fly up to her and chuck a diamond at her. Now where I come from that means he wants to marry her but I think it was just a random treasure gift thing.
Anyway at the end of it she and the bunny heads get crushed by a giant one eyed slobber monster. I'm not quite sure what this was. Maybe someone had slipped a short term hallucinagine into my soda. It apparently wore off before the feature so... good?
My Little Pony: The Movie follows the continuing adventures of six jelly bean colored horses as they try to save their home from a villain who has bad "spell" service (Liev Schreiber) and wants to... wait for it... take over the world. His main instrument for this is a scarred up unicorn named Tempest Shadow (Emily Blunt) and her mouthpiece Grubber (Michael Pena).
In a surprising turn that will change the very fabric of the show Twilight Sparkle (Tara Strong) has to stop planning a festival and save her home with the help of her friends. Along the way they sing songs and bounce into other characters that will aid them in their quest. In the end everything gets wrapped up in a perfect bow and everything works out.
This movie would have been great... as a season of the show. As a movie though it's a decidedly mixed bag that moves between set pieces and skimps on development among other things. For every good thing that can be said about the movie you can actually say a bad thing.
The animation is really smooth and the water animation is particularly nice. However, there are plenty of times when stuff like a waterwheel is moving and it just doesn't look right or there are times it felt like the mouths were over emphasizing the end of a sentence. The backgrounds are nice and the characters are well designed but the lighting tends to stay very neutral and does little to add any emotional gravitas to a scene.
The music is good and on their own the songs are for the most part fine. Then again, none of them really stood out. Even the villain song was just okay and was more of a lament that was a little to close to Starlight Glimmer's past (My friends quit chilling with me so I split and became evil).
The writing has some good jokes and lines but the overall story is very rushed. In a way it suffers from "The Crystalling" syndrome where you have way too many characters and if you erased a number of them it would be the exact same story minus an off screen joke or two. The pacing is so brisk that scenes are merely set pieces and whatever emotional honesty they try to get out of their characters is lost. Backstories and motivations come and go in the snap of a finger and none of it really matters.
In the end My Little Pony: The Movie is a mixed bag. Little kids will probably enjoy bright colors and songs. There's even some action in it too. However, when it comes to the narrative the movie falls flat. Had this story been told through an entire season it might have been the best season of the show to date. As it stands it's another one of those kids movies that they'll probably forget about a week later even if they're a fan of the show.
The stats:
20-30 dead bodies (They're storm troopers guard whatever. They wear masks. They don't matter.)
Breasts: 0 (duh)
Immolation
Shatter on Impact
Claw to the face
Statue turning
Magic Fu
Song Fu
Dragon as flamethrower Fu
Pun Fu
Standouts:
Emily Blunt as Tempest Shadow the calm, cool and dangerous leader of the Storm King's army.
Taye Diggs as Capper the con-cat. His bit about the ponies being infected is one of the better parts of the movie.
Liev Schreiber as the Storm King who has a lot of fun playing around with the sun and moon.
Sam Vincent as Party Favor for his reaction to a balloon animal getting popped.
I was just thinking it'd been a while since your last review. Sorry to hear things are getting you down.
Anything the rest of us can do?
As for the movie, I really need to see it again to look for some of the finer points that you raised. We actually tried to all go see it as a family (after Oldest and I saw it opening night), but Baby Wubs was uncharacteristically uncooperative, so I only caught the beginning and end.
I watched the short even more intently the second time I went to the theater, trying to make any kind of sense of it. As much as I don't want to just decry "kids these days" I have to say the whole thing was just a colorful pile of WTF.
I hope the new year gets better for you.. I have mixed feeling about the movie as well. While I enjoyed it. It was like you said I went, saw it, forgot about it five minutes after I left the theater. It never did leave a mark on me.
Isn’t it great to perform self surgery? Then you don’t even have to deal with the healthcare system!
4707811
I thought it was some insane animation intern thing added at the beginning to go “hey look, our interns can animate a genuine LSD trip!” 
Oh my god, that short came with the movie?
4707811
For me it's just a matter of accomplishing some stuff that I want to get done and get some more sustained sleep. It's not like I don't sleep it's just more I have to get up early. With a vacation where I'm not required to do anything finally coming up I intend to knock both of those requirements out of the park.
That said, I do truly appreciate the concern. It means a lot.
As far as the movie goes if you really liked it that's cool. I might one day write up how I'd have gone about it. The thing is ... I get the feeling Hasbro may have had some notes that influenced it too.
4708756
It'll get better. It's just I've gotta break down some of those mental things by having successes and some sleep again. Hope you're well too and that things aren't too insane for you.
4709086
It's the best!
4709086
4707811
Okay so... that short was Hanazuki: Full of Treasures and it's apparently a toy line from Hasbro. The cartoon is a youtube show through Titmouse inc. In the show the main character is more or less in charge of protecting that moon from a big black ink mass that will destroy it. One of the writers and producers of the show is Dave Polsky who wrote for the MLP show and did episodes like "Too Many Pinkie Pies" and "Rarity Takes Manehattan."
As far as I can tell I guess the assumption was that little girls would know what Hanazuki was and what all was going on. So basically it was a short episode that served as sort of a commercial for the line and the web show. I guess. I watched the first one and there was a lot of fighting over an ice cream bar that eventually turns into an angry red tree. Apparently the episode was somewhat popular garnering almost 5 million views at the time I watched it on Youtube. Interestingly enough it had a 9k thumbs up to 3k thumbs down rating making me wonder how legit the view number really is.