You can’t whinny them all.
Friendship may be magic, but there’s nothing particularly enchanting about My Little Pony: The Movie. It’s going to leave fans of the series frustrated and everybody else completely baffled as to why this show was popular in the first place.
Here’s a refresher course. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the modern reboot of an extremely fluffy 1980s animated series and toy line. To its credit, it is a reboot that did almost everything right. The increasingly large cast of characters are well drawn, literally and figuratively, and have relationships that evoke genuine affection and cheerful laughter. The musical numbers are, mostly, catchy and upbeat. And the stories promote positive messages about problem-solving through empathy, civility and the application of ethics.
My Little Pony: The Movie, on the other hand, is a blunt and tedious adventure about two villains -- Tempest Shadow (voiced by Emily Blunt) and The Storm King (voiced by Liev Schreiber) -- who attacks Equestria and sends The Mane Six -- Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie (and Spike, the dragon) -- on a mission to save the land with a magical MacGuffin. Along the way our heroes accrue new friends and learn that the real power is in the allies they have made, not in the magical doodad they thought was so danged important in the first place.
To the outside observer, that might sound all well and good. But it’s worth noting that anyone who would pay good money to see My Little Pony: The Movie is probably already a fan of the series, so completely ignoring everything that came before this movie was a crass and off-putting decision on multiple levels.
For one, the characters our heroes meet -- like Capper, a fully anthropomorphic cat (voiced by Taye Diggs), and Captain Celaeno, a fully anthropomorphic pirate parrot (voiced by Zoe Saldana) -- break the rules of the series by being fully anthropomorphic. The design philosophy of the show is completely subverted for the purpose of introducing new characters who aren’t necessary to the story, and read like self-insert fanfic characters.
Add to this the fact that it’s already been established that cats in this universe are cat-sized, and can’t talk. Rarity has one as a pet for crying out loud. So this is like if you walked outside and found out MC Skat Kat was moving in next door. I’m sure he’d be a very nice neighbor but your world wouldn’t make sense anymore, and surely madness would follow.
It’s also frustrating that the plot of My Little Pony: The Movie revolves around finding a powerful, magical MacGuffin when, as anyone who actually watches the series knows, The Mane Six are already friends with an all-powerful chaos God who would do literally anything for Fluttershy if she asked. All they really had to do is call Discord up and solve all their problems. And if for some reason Discord wasn’t available, they also have armies of dragons and changelings who owe them no small amount of favors.
To put this in a way that non-My Little Pony viewers might understand: imagine if the plot of the next Iron Man movie sent Tony Stark on quest to find an indestructible shield, and he never even mentioned that Captain America exists. It’d be weird, okay?
Even weirder is that, after some forgettable songs and some mostly tedious and episodic plotting, the day is saved through not by friendship and understanding, but through violence. At one point Capper and Spike literally set people on fire. One of these characters is completely consumed by flames and falls over, and we cut away from that scene and we never look back. That dude was made of fur. He’s probably dead now.
Ignoring the dramatic shifts in character design, and ignoring the story that ignores all the other stories, My Little Pony: The Movie falls apart in the end because it resolves its conflict the way that conventional blockbusters do, and not in the way that My Little Pony does. One of the villainous characters does indeed see the light at the end, but the only way they’re allowed to illustrate their redemption is to perform an act of violence on another villain. A villain who no one attempts to reason with or understand, because he isn’t given a reasonable point of view, other than an arbitrary commitment to stock villainy.
The Verdict
The value of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is that it proposes to a hopeful audience the idea that living responsibly, happily, and with consideration for others isn’t just possible, it’s a noble aspiration. The movie doesn’t convey this message, and falls back on tiresome action-adventure clichés instead. It’s frustrating enough to give you the trots.
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