A long time ago I took a look at the My Little Pony movie from 2017, based on the 2010 series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I always intended to take a look at the original 1986 feature afterwards, and since it's May, I might as well take a look at it now. My Little Pony is one of those franchises that you feel mostly stayed relevant because of nostalgia, like the people who grew up watching this cartoon would go on to make their own version of it, like with Ninja Turtles or Transformers. It sometimes makes me question why some franchises get left behind? I'm thankful for Friendship is Magic on some level, but why can't we also get a cool reboot of Jem and the Holograms? We got a reboot of DuckTales, why not a reboot of House of Mouse? I may not be able to answer those questions now, because there are a lot of answers, but can I get some understanding from this movie? Probably not.
It is the first of Spring and the Ponies wish to celebrate, but three witches wish to spoil their fun by summoning the Smooze, and the ponies have to find a way to stop the Smooze after the rainbow of light gets swallowed up by them. Even though it was powerful enough to breakthrough the goo after literally being swallowed by them. Meanwhile, one of the ponies runs away after being scolded for a disastrous performance and gets stuck at the bottom of a cliff near a river, and now she must find her way back home with the help of weird goblin like creatures called the Grundles. Overall the plot is fine, though maybe a bit dragged out, there is a scene of the witches in this movie that is just given to "Hilarious slapstick antics", and too much of this movie is given to song numbers. Yes, this is another movie where they have too little spacing between the songs... Maybe I should look into why this happens sometime.
I think it's mostly a problem here because the songs aren't good. They aren't all sung badly, though some of them are, and one of them is just barely performed, but none of them are really memorable. On top of that the backing score is uninspired as well, I swear I heard the same title theme melody multiple times. The rest of it is forgettable, but does it's job. The same can be said for the animation, it is serviceable, it looks colourful and I noticed no real errors. It just looks like someone put the TV show onto the big screen. It worked in favour of Blue's Clues because that movie was A) Direct-to-Video, and B) based on a show that was stylized to the point that looking more theatrical would be less appealing. Imagine this movie with the animation quality of The Secret of NIMH or The Fox and the Hound, wouldn't that be something?
I feel like most of the animation's problems come down to the editing as well, some shots don't even last for a full second, and it was just too distracting. Speaking of distracting, yeah a movie based on a toy-line property is going to sell some toys. The minute I saw the "Paradise Estate" my first thought was "Only $29.99". I guess not everything became a toy, I can't find any evidence of the Grundles becoming a toy, nor the Smooze prior to G4. On top of that, I really can't hold this against this movie too much, it was kind of the big thing about cartoons back then.
Now we get to the characters. They were all mostly bland, the most character we got out of them was that some of them were pessimistic and worrisome while others weren't. Most of the characters were just insufferable to watch, with some minor exceptions. The villains weren't insufferable, just rather annoying, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn and Rhea Perlman did fine enough performances, but put on rather grating voices, and they were expected to sing in those voices too. Charlie Adler also puts on a grating voice for Spike, and let's just say Cathy Weseluck's incarnation of the role could not come fast enough. Danny DeVito does a good performance though, so there's that. Here's something funny though, Charlie Adler, Russi Taylor, Tammy Armstrong, Sheryl Bernstein, Susan Blu, Nancy Cartwright and so many other talented voice actors playing the characters that everyone went to see this movie for, none of them got an opening credit. Reminds me of the 2017 movie, how they had all these celebrity names on the poster, but not one mention of any of the actors playing the main characters, the characters that we went to the movie to see. Give that awful Pinocchio movie credit, it at least put Tom Kenny's name on the box, neither of these theatrically released movies gave the same respect to the voice actors who voiced the lead roles, shameful.
I hate this movie. Yeah, I know it's made for little girls, but that does not excuse how insufferable of a drag this movie was. Nothing about it was entertaining, nothing about it was exciting, and I know some of you are going to bring up The Transformers: The Movie, which I also reviewed a long while ago. Here's the thing, I didn't really like that movie either, it was sloppy in a lot of places, but it at least had some well done action scenes to warrant watching even if only once, and if this movie had some well done music scenes, or even just a well done filler scene, something that made it worth checking out, I'd give it some credit. Whatever all the kids saw in this movie, and The Transformers movie too, I don't see it. Then again, these movies are way before my time and made for a different audience. Cartoons have changed a lot since the 80s, and it has been for the better and for the worse in a lot of places. Even cartoons aimed primarily at young girls have changed, and say what you want about Friendship is Magic or Littlest Pet Shop, but they have gotten a fanbase for a good reason, and that fanbase has grown beyond the target audience, and while that's lead to a smorgasbord of problems, trust me I've been through a bunch of them, it just goes to show the quality of them.
I'm putting this movie alongside Felix the Cat: The Movie, if it was strictly up to me, I'd give this movie an Avoid, I can't imagine this movie being someone's big inspiration to get into animation. But, I have to concede that I am not judging this strictly on my own opinions, but I am recommending them on multiple qualities. So while I found this movie boring and unwatchable, it's ultimately harmless, I can't imagine this movie really tanking the reputation of animation as a medium, and who knows, if you have a little girl, she might get some inspiration out of it. We got Friendship is Magic out of this franchise, so it had to be inspiring to some degree. Then again, you can just put on Friendship is Magic, and that would be so much better. So no, I don't recommend this movie on any level, show them G4 instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment