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| "And the winner of Most Awesome Cyan Pegasus is..." |
If Rainbow Roadtrip had been announced this time last year, I suspect the reveal of Kim Beyer-Johnson as its writer might have caused some serious disquiet. At the time, she was known only for the widely panned "Non-Compete Clause". However, with Beyer-Johnson having at least partially redeemed herself with the considerably superior "Sweet and Smoky" a few weeks ago, I went into Rainbow Roadtrip with a reasonable amount of optimism. And as things turned out...
...it wasn't a bad way of passing an hour, really. I'll say straight out that the material seemed to be stretched a little thin for its run time, which does make me wonder what else was going to be included if this had ended up as a big-screen movie sequel. The pace of Rainbow Roadtrip was rarely hectic and was occasionally approaching glacial, to an extent that harked right back to some of the less action-packed early-series episodes.
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| "Us two should do... Barrel rolls. Hah! Geddit?" |
That animation, then. The rumours are, and have been for some time, that the G5 series will be animated in Toon Boom (albeit with a CGI prequel movie) and on this showing, I don't see any reason to fear that. Rainbow Roadtrip didn't look quite as attractive as the 2017 film, but then it didn't have a big-screen budget behind it. Given everything, I thought the visuals were really rather nice. The amount of greyness caused by the storyline did hamper the beauty a bit, admittedly.
If you've read much ponyfic, you'll probably have come across some variation on the "desaturated world" trope. (An interesting variation on the theme is Razgriz57's Pinkie Pie story The Only One In Color, which is gently recommended.) In this special, the Mane Six are invited to the Rainbow Festival in Hope Hollow, only to find that colour has drained out of its world – quite literally. They set themselves to trying to help restore brightness and happiness to the town.
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| Probably Fluttershy's second best scene |
Hope Hollow is apparently in Minnesota. I'm clearly missing something as a non-American, but FiM really seems to love that accent. Anyway, there are three major new characters: hotel owner (and much else) Petunia Petals, fashion designer Kerfuffle and grouchy handymare Torque Wrench. I thought they were all given solid characters, and it's unsurprising that Kerfuffle (with an intriguingly never-remarked-upon artificial leg) is the fan favourite. It's Torque for me, though.
It's at about this time in some reviews that I complain about the lack of things for Fluttershy to do. Rainbow Roadtrip wasn't a disaster in that respect, and 'Shy's scene with the apricots was one of her best and showed off her character development over recent seasons. She was otherwise mostly confined to making brief, cute observations, though, as well as simply helping Pinkie bake rather than getting a task of her own. I think "Sweet and Smoky" gave Flutters a rather meatier role.
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| At last the Colour Trout is over and done with! |
I'm undecided about how much I enjoyed the subplot with Rainbow Dash teaching the two foals, Barley Barrel and Pickle Barrel. They were fairly generic kid characters, and already I find myself struggling to remember much about them beyond the Rainbow Dash fan club. (Scootaloo may have something to say about that!) As far as Dash herself went, I did quite enjoy her aerobatic attempts to restore the colour, such as a sort of reverse sonic rainboom. I do think rainbooms have become too commonplace, though.
We had two and a half songs in Rainbow Roadtrip, the half being the 30-second introductory jingle. "The End of the Rainbow" gave an opportunity for Mayor Sunny Skies to provide some exposition as to what had gone wrong in Hope Hollow. I wasn't a huge fan: while pleasant, the tune was unmemorable and some of the lyrics rather awkward. The upbeat finale, "Living in Color", I liked considerably more – but it still didn't come close to the likes of "Open Up Your Eyes" or "Time to Be Awesome".
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| Perhaps Kerfuffle's leg's backstory was one of the things cut from the movie script? |
Also: the American pronunciation of "apricot" really distracted me. I had no idea! (We say "ay-pri-cot" over here, for those wondering.)
Best line: Mayor Sunny Skies: "The trout doubles on harmonica."
Best moment: Kerfuffle introducing herself to Rarity
Worst moment: "20 percent cooler" played straight. Please, no.
Yays
- A very good, Pony-appropriate moral
- One really excellent scene for Fluttershy
- Some nicely varied guest characters
- Attractive animation for the most part
- A shame the plot dictated so much greyness
- Pedestrian pacing, sometimes very slow indeed
- A few awkward moments in the script
- Songs a notch below the show's best
In which Friendship is Magic becomes its own one-off spinoff comic!
ReplyDeleteI mentioned this somewhere else, but honestly, if you told me that G5 would centre on the Hope Hollow ponies and that this was our transition episode, I'd have been perfectly happy. Torque was my favourite of the new guys too, but Kerfuffle was adorable (and, as with Scootaloo's aunts, I felt just having a character with a prosthetic limb exist onscreen without drawing any kind of recognition or comment made me so very proud of this show), ditto Petunia with her background waving and cheery "Hellooooo!", the flustered mayor, the retired couple and their grumpy neighbour, the kids, the, um, Trout. I would actually watch My Little Pony: Hope Hollow Tales on a weekly basis.
I feel I'm probably going to be in the minority, but I adored the "season 1 in molasses" pace of this. I fully acknowledge I'm biased in this regard - most of my own stories move at a similar pace, i.e. best enjoyed by those who find snails thrillingly fast, and as someone who generally loves the slice of life genre this was the absolute, um, sliciest - but I found it an absolute joy to just spend time with these characters, on holiday from their daily routines and from the main run of the series. I loved that there was no villain, no frantic plot time limit, just a whole load of largely empty space for characters familiar and new to stretch their legs/wings/whatever. We'll literally never have this chance in canon again to just watch the ponies ambling around like this, and I'm really and truly grateful we got to do it this time.
Absolutely with you on the music. The abrupt clipping off of the first song was a surprise; Best Gift Ever got its hooks into me straight away with that soaring One More Day chorus, but this was as if it got truncated before hitting its stride. That second song was barely a "song" at all, either - barring a nice repeated hook line ('the end of the rainbow'), it actually reminded me a lot more of bardic poetry in that it was, essentially, a paragraph of fairly dense expositionary prose, sung so shapelessly that it might as well have been extemporaneous. I was exchanging disbelieving looks with my family through most of it - lines like "but the extra magic was too much for the rainbow generator" were... a thing that happened. And my son pointed out immediately that Living In Color, winner of Best Song by default, bore more than a passing similarity to Everything Is Awesome (from the Lego Movie). And he meant it as a compliment.
Probably-not-entertaining trivia: Richard Curtis was so amused by the different ways Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts pronounced the word 'apricot' on the set of Notting Hill, he wrote it into a scene in the movie.
Thinking about it, I think I would have been more than satisfied by 22 minutes of ponies just ambling around in a S1-type way, and probably still pleased with 44. For me, though, 60 was just that bit too long.
DeleteAnd my son pointed out immediately that Living In Color, winner of Best Song by default, bore more than a passing similarity to Everything Is Awesome
It does, too! I wouldn't have thought that was a deliberate inspiration on the lines of the old Sondheim-inspired songs, but you never know.
Oh, also, et tu, China? Are there any countries left in the world now that HAVEN'T leaked or broadcast MLP/EQG stuff early? Off the top of my head we've had the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Norway, Denmark, South Africa, New Zealand, Italy, Mexico, the US itself, and now China too, all managing to mess up. I feel like maybe Hasbro should just leave the remaining episode master tapes lying around unattended at the UN, and see which country wants to go next.
ReplyDeleteRather surprisingly, Ireland doesn't seem to have had an early release. You can add Poland to your list, though: "The Fault in Our Cutie Marks" premiered there a few days before its US airing.
DeleteWell, given we only have about ten TV channels that aren't just UK channels broadcast here as well, that's no real surprise. But given we have all those UK channels, we've had them early too, courtesy of Tiny Pop.
DeleteIn part, over the show's run, episodes have been gradually delivered in final form to Hasbro earlier before release (perhaps the nearly year-long gap between Season 4 and 5 contributed a bit too). Sure, DHX recently fully wrapped production (as tweeted by Jim Miller), and judging by past years we won't get the last episode until October, a full four months after it was finished. So I can only guess that Discovery Family keeps to their schedule and Hasbro gives the episodes to all the overseas networks to air, and since they don't own those channels (whereas they do partly own Discovery Family), they have less leverage over making sure those territories don't air early. Or perhaps the policy overseas tends to be to dub and air them ASAP after they get them, to not fall behind the US airing, except they're not reliably informed the US airings are waiting in the can.
Who knows, but I'll part all of the above is factored into these early airing trends the past few years.
I think you're right, 44 minutes would have let them cut some of the chaff (here's a scene of Fluttershy looking at butterflies! Now here's just the butterflies themselves!) and also tone down on the commercial breaks. D: Those things were ridiculous. And then it wouldn't have had to be an hour and a half! And I could have gotten my review out on time! And started helping my friend move sooner! >:| I'm still mad at this thing.
ReplyDeleteThe commercial break thing is probably an important point - I saw a download version that already had the many ads removed, which I guess may have made its horizontallyklaid back pacing easier to indulge when nothing much happened between breaks. Watching the Berrytube stream afterwards, it was definitely frustrating on that score.
Delete> her ability to talk to Torque. (Oh Logan, you are a card.)
ReplyDeleteThis is completely random, but speaking as someone with a passing interest in differences of pronunciation, I feel like this may be lost on a lot of Americans, for whom those words wouldn't come close to rhyming...
(Unless the joke is something else I don't get because I didn't watch it)
Nope, you're right. It hadn't occurred to me, if I'm honest, but I'm not going to change it. Consider it a small, quiet act of push-back against the countless blogs (in this fandom and beyond) that make jokes only Americans will get. ;)
DeleteThis special’s plot is decent but it should be shorter and more condensed. If the plot is too thin and too predictable, shortening the length time is a good thing, not dragging out. I feel like they try to appeal to the younger audience, so it explained why it feels laid back and simplistic. I have seen more complex mlp episodes in 22 minutes.
ReplyDeleteAt least this is another decent piece of works from the writer who wrote the worst ep so she redeemed herself.
There are 13 episodes left, I hope the next stories will be more exciting because i'm hungry for exciting stuffs.
Yes, it does happily seem as though "Non-Compete Clause" was an aberration. If we get another K B-J episode before S9 is up, I won't mind too much now.
DeleteHaving rewatched it, it doesn't feel AS laggy without the somewhat overdone commercials (though the fades-to-blacks announce themselves much more so then a normal episode where they're properly baked in - some of these almost feel like they wouldn't be there in the actual version that'll appear on Netflix in the future), but it still should have been a 44-min episode. I can think of no clearer evidence of this then the fact that it spends 12 whole minutes - no, really - on the ponies meeting the Mayor, getting the tour of the highlights, the exposition song, resolving to help, and splitting. 12. Whole. Minutes. While cutting this down would obviously start with some visual pacing in places and trimming or removing/combining one of the "Mane 6 with a new character (s)" subplots, a sequence like that is an easy candidate to slash by a 1/3 of its length in a flash. That sequence especially felt like a first draft, in as far as any screenwriter will tell you their first draft always overshoots the required lengths (M.A. Larson once remarked his scripts almost always hit 33 pages rather then 30 at first; I've heard other writers nearly hit 40 on rare occasions).
ReplyDelete