My Little Pony: Equestria Girls

Well here we are after a long way 3 seasons and enough drama to nearly split the internet in two. I am going to keep this review as simple as possible in an attempt to spoil as little as possible.

Two things out of many that make this show brilliant is the animation and music. Thankfully Equestria Girls does not disappoint in either. The opening sequence alone is a remix of the main theme with a lot of excellent movement to match the music being played, everyone agreed that it should be a replacement for the current opening of the main show. Daniel Ingram is a man of talent and it is no surprise that he does not disappoint. As for the main show the songs vary quite a lot in both theme and style. There are a few musical numbers with lot of dancing and singing.

Now comes the main plot of the movie. It is a bit on the weak side with the ending feeling very rushed. Personally I feel that rushed endings seem to be a recurring problem in the series too. One has to take into account the target audience and the fact that we may not get to see an extremely deep movie that Hasbro may feel it too over-complex for a younger audience to comprehend. Most fans of the show will predict what happens long before it occurs on screen. The journey getting there however is entertaining.

One of the subplots of the show was Twilight Sparkle attempting to adjust to her new body, both alicorn and human. In the human world she also has difficulty using technology on top of coping with the loss of magic. This comes out to a bunch of legitimately funny jokes that surprisingly do not get old as the story progresses.

The characters are well done both the main six and the many secondary / background characters that appear in the show. Without giving too much away they perform exactly as one may expect the pony versions to do. None of their actions felt too out of character or forced.

To summarize if you go in there expecting some great epic journey you won't find it. If you walk in the theater looking for some good laughs and colorful characters you will find it. They set out to create something that can be fun for the whole family and succeeded.

Lastly you should hang around for the ending credits as there is a bit of surprise there just for the fans.

To me, this just seems like one big episode of the show, not really a movie. But that doesn't matter. The Show MLP: FiM started out as a children's show, (ages 6-11 or so) never mind the fan base, it should be treated as such. If you compare Equestria Girls to any other modern kids show made into a movie, it will be obvious the Equestria Girls raises the bar for animation, voice acting, song writing, and overall quality of the show. The songs are amazing, the voice acting is incredible, and the animation is better than any I've ever seen.

I strongly recommend this movie to families, bronies, and children. That's who it was made for.

10/10 - Fantastic movie.

Some shows fit as movies, like Firefly. Some shows on the other hand will never make good movies… unless it deviates from the show entirely. Because some of them are too complex and convoluted, like Game of Thrones, while other are the exact opposite: simple shows, which you do not watch for the plot.

That is where we encounter the first hurdle. Equestria Girls does not deviate from the show. It looks and feels like a bad pilot episode of a bad show… and they generally do not premiere in cinemas.

Equestria Girls disregards the strengths of the show: humans instead of ponies, generic high school setting instead of an interesting magical pony land and a bitch that is mean to everyone but obviously will be put back in line by Twilight Sparkle… instead of having none of that. The movie is so predictable, it hurts.

Apropos generic: Twilight Sparkle meets a boy who wears a black sports jacket, is athletic and plays the electric guitar like Jimi Henrix and is the antagonist's ex. And that is that.

There are a few songs featured in Equestria Girls, not unlike the show. These songs are quite different though. Techno and Pop has taken a hold of the score and it sounds like generic radio music. While the songs in "Friendship is Magic" were a part of an actual scene, they now seem randomly placed, just for the sake of it.

Friendship is Magic is animated with Flash and so is this movie. Unfortunately the humans look very stiff and unnatural. The movement of the humans appears choppy, almost as if they skipped frames, which would not surprise me. Lauren Faust's style of the show doesn't fit humans, and they look awkward. Probably, because no humans where originally planned.

One thing that bothered me from day one was the human counterparts of the ponies. It is as if someone (who never even watched "Friendship is Magic") designed them over a weekend, and a colorblind person at that who had no idea how to blend and mix colors. Color theory, what sorcery is this?

Firstly, they deiced to color the skin of the humans like the coat of the ponies. Twilight Sparkle has purple skin, Pinkie Pie is pink and Rainbow Dash is blue. It works for the ponies, but not for the humans. The colors clash like the titans did 1981 and it is not a pretty sight. But how else should we know what human is representing what pony, right…?

There are also small things like every one of the six girls are basically wearing the same things: knee high boots and skirts. Someone truly did an amazing copy paste job, efficiency at its best. Or an insult to Lauren Faust's original and varied design of the ponies. Like the show, the movie was made for girls, but the quality is lacking. It is a badly written mess with lackluster animation quality and laughable design. Equestria Girls is without a doubt the Phantom Menace of My Little Pony. AVOID

I haven't been watching the series for that many months, but it left so much of a mark on me that I knew I had to go see this in theaters. And I have no regrets doing so. I mean, it's not one of the strongest things to come out of the MLP G4 franchise, but for what I could've gotten with this concept, which is... let's be fair, odd, a lot of things did exceed my expectations.

Let's start with the story execution. Aside from the whole "Twilight Sparkle is a high school human" dealie, there doesn't seem to be much to the premise, just sort-of a 'win your goal'-type plot. However, they manage to make it intriguing and very entertaining to watch with how character-driven they make the actual storytelling, especially with the characters they have to work with, but we'll get to that later. What's more is that despite there being a lot of small, extra scenes involving Twilight having to get accustomed to her new surroundings, they almost never forget the actual story; and even though the spotlight stays on Twilight like it should, at its core it is still about friendship, which is really what the show always was. Finally, it's just flat-out funny, from character reveals to series callbacks to simple but fitting character-based lines.

Next, the visuals. DHX really knows how to make flash animation look good, and this is among their best work. There are a huge variety of character movements (much less restricted than the pony figures), some really cool-looking effects, and surprisingly, I even found myself getting really accustomed to some of the human designs as well. Not all of them work (ex. Celestia, Luna, and Big Mac), but many of them actually blend with their pony counterparts pretty darn well (ex. Rarity, Fluttershy, and the Cutie Mark Crusaders). Even some of the backgrounds, like the Fall Formal and the Crystal Empire (which I'm usually not all that impressed by) managed to prove appealing as well.

The music takes a different style from that of the series, going more pop-ish and overall more fitting of the high school environment. While I don't think the score is bad per say, it does prove to be a little on the generic side. The same can be said for the musical numbers themselves, and while I didn't hate any of them, the only one I truly remember is "Helping Twilight Win the Crown", which will leave you humming afterward.

Now onto the characters, starting with the main cast. Twilight is just as lovably nerdy but still admirable as ever, even further strengthened by the support from Spike, who's a dog here. Yeah, don't worry, they manage to work that out okay. The human counterparts of her friends are obviously faithful to their originals, but what makes them work particularly well here is that each of them get their own time to shine that never feel out of place, and at least most of them get something new added to their roles as well to fit the setting, which I thought was a really nice touch and it made them all the more interesting to watch in an alternate reality.

For the secondary characters, they weren't as nice. I mean, you've got those that are pretty much just cameos or throwaway jokes, such as Trixie and Vinyl Scratch, which can be fun to watch as little as they add, but you've also got some others that are put in a role that just don't fit, such as Celestia & Luna being the principals and Snips & Snails being the henchmen to the antagonist, Sunset Shimmer. Speaking of Sunset, I find her a decent antagonist with her menacing appearance, reputation, and ultimate goal, but with the bits of backstory they give her and her competence in Equestria, you really wish there were more of those. But instead, it's traded for little more than just menacing attributes and a pointless twist at the climax. The other new character is the love interest Flash Sentry, and even though he isn't a useless character, both him and the romance angle are just weak. If they really wanted this to work, they seriously needed to put much more passion and effort into it, because they really treaded some dangerous waters with this.

Of course, all this is not to say I'm supporting the high school idea in the first place. As well as they handle it, it's so bizarre merely in its existence. I mean, the film was obviously made for marketing purposes (just Hasbro doing their business), but I don't even know what the mindset was with them making the toys in the first place. What did they intend to accomplish with this exactly? Well, for me, it'll probably remain a mystery.

All in all, on its own, Equestria Girls isn't really a good movie, but if you take it as a TV movie like it was originally intended to be, as well as one made for marketing at that, you'll probably find at least something to like about it, even if the movie as a whole doesn't manage to satisfy you. I personally managed to find a lot more to enjoy. If you aren't a fan of the series, you probably won't get into it here. If you are, you should probably give it at least a chance, and be sure to take it for what it's worth.

For a start... it definitely did not warrant a theatre release.

No additional effort was put into the animation beyond the TV series other than the opening credits animation, at all. Would have been a nice two-parter to link the existing My Little Pony seasons 3 and 4 together.

Two, it's so obvious the entire movie is a giant advertisement for Hasbro to sell anthro-based dolls based on popular characters. The way the characters are introduced and stylised, it's just glaring and grating.

The basic story? As predictable as ever, even for a MLP episode. Which is fine for a MLP episode, but not for a movie, hence back to my original belief it didn't warrant a theatre release. The fact that it's set in such a tedious and over-used setting as a school formal? Awful. So much opportunity for this to have been done better was wasted on a cliché. The ponies are regressed to teenage years when in Ponyville they are already mares, ie mature. The movie should have reflected this, and used it to encourage girls (and guys) in a more positive direction than what it does.

The writing was about as standard as the series, but I'm disappointed with the whole image of the movie. Everyone is thin and anaemic, with the exception of Snails, and lo and behold, the unpopular "bad guy henchman" is fat. The ONLY fat person in the entire movie. In the series, all the ponies are rounded, or at least full-bodied; all this movie does is perpetuate the stick-insect mentality of fashion that girls are now being encouraged to pursue. Which leads to...

Concepts of friendship are nice to see in this movie, and I'm glad they are there. But the series does a much better job of teaching those concepts in a manner that isn't muddied by imagery that is counter-productive to many children's' self-esteem. This movie is a step backwards for the quality of the show, not a step forwards.

So, overall? Poor. It *could* have been so much more. Instead, we got dreck. It's 4, perhaps a 5 out of 10. For the absolute littlies only, and I say that with hesitation given the body-image impressions it's setting up for them.

I hope this stays a one-off, and is never attempted again.