Going to keep this pretty simple because, as it stands, I don’t have much to comment on (always do better with full movies than trailers). Still, because of the legacy of My Little Pony in terms of my content (see my entire previous blog about primarily MLP Gen 4) I thought it worth offering at least a few comments on and I do have this “ramble” tag for general stuff like this.
So, long story short, the trailer looks good. Based on it and other information, the central story of the movie is that the pegasi, unicorns, and Earth ponies live separately in a new era of fear and mistrust. As seen in the trailer, even the presence of one pony of another group coming into town can induce mass panic. Sunny Starscout (played by Vanessa Hudgens) is an Earth Pony who is convinced the three types of ponies can one day be friends again and joins up in a quest to a unicorn named Izzy Moonbow (played by Kimiko Glenn) to help find out why unicorn magic has disappeared. In the process they meet up with a wide range of other characters, including pegasi Zipp Storm (Liza Koshy) and Pipp Petals (Sofia Carson) as well as Earth pony Hitch Trailblazer (James Marsden).
Nothing in the trailer really hints at anything more complex than this, and I don’t expect it to. After all, MLP is a younger children’s franchise, so simple stories about friendship and learning to have empathy and connections with people different from you is pretty bread and butter. Production values look pretty good as well. While I’m always going to be a bit of a 2D-animation snob due to my childhood, the 3D animation looks very well executed and has the sort of bouncy energy I would expect to see in this, as well as the bright coloring. As I noted in my review of Centaurworld, Kimiko Glenn is an excellent singer, so I just hope Izzy Moonbow gets some good musical numbers to really show that off.
The one thing that I know some fans of the previous generation will likely latch onto is the Easter egg of the Mane 6 of the previous generation sitting on Sunny’s shelves. To what extent this series is meant to be a sequel or connected to the previous generation in any way has been a main point of speculation among certain fans of the previous generation. I, personally, don’t really care about that, both because at least to my understanding any generation break like this is usually pretty clean for MLP and because, if there are connections, it is likely to be in the same way that, say, the Zelda franchise handles things: very, very loose, but otherwise free to do whatever the heck they want between games.
So, whenever the movie, special, and tv show come out, don’t expect me to get too caught up on the previous generation or any theory crafting about that (unless they really do try and pull something). Instead, I’m going to take it for what I think it should be: a new entry into a long-standing franchise wanting to do its own thing while playing with some of the toys of the previous entries because hey, why not?
Whammy Analyzes 