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| The CHS library would do justice to a medium-sized city |
Written by Meghan McCarthy
16 Jun 2013 (limited US/Canada release)
My original rating: 7/10 (=★★★)
IMDb score: 6.2
The one with Twilight's wing-tucking problems
Thoughts: Oh, how this one angered the fandom back in 2013! Lauren Faust was famously unhappy with the stick-thin human girls (and she had a point) but in the run-up to Equestria Girls' release it's fair to say supporters were in a decided minority. In the end, though, it largely won people over, with the humans being so clearly like their familiar FiM characters (and with their familiar voice actors) absolutely key. I went to see it in the cinema, since it had a reasonably accessible (if limited) UK release, and the sheer wonderfulness of seeing ponies on the big screen – after all, the first section is ponies – was enough to compensate for everything else. Now? Well, the whole Humane approach is vastly more familiar to us all, but equally the novelty has worn off. As a film, this is frankly a mish-mash of memes and references – Derpy's muffiny cameo, the cut-off CMC theme, etc – linked together by a pretty obvious story. Perhaps even more than with the 2017 FiM movie, complete MLP newcomers will miss a good deal of the fun. You have to put up with the teen-movie clichés (why hello there, Flash Sentry) and a few bizarre touches such as Celestia's iffy character design. It's strange encountering Sunset Shimmer as a villain again, complete with darker red in her hair. By no means all villains become more interesting after reformation, but Sunset will. Her demon form is a nice little "you know, for kids" moment, but it's rather overshadowed by all the magical girl stuff with the ponying up etc. Songs? Well, one absolute classic (you know which one!), the odd other decent one ("This Strange World"), a solid theme tune remix but also some forgettable blah. I think I still like this enough to let it keep its three-star rating, but it probably only just scrapes that these days. Stick your brain on autopilot and just let it wash over you.
Choice quote: Twilight: "I have no idea!"
New rating: ★★★
When I return with this series, it will be back to FiM and the start of Season 4. I'm sure that season, one which is unique in some ways, will be quite an interesting ride!
Unsurprisingly, I don't like this one very much. The AU premise was always a bad idea, and the tired plot that doesn't even do much with either the AU aspect or the world-threatening stakes is more embarrassing than anything.
ReplyDeleteWell, I suppose Sunset's story had to start somewhere. It's a shame too, because she has a great backstory and works pretty well as a thief and a demon. Her character will only get better from here. And I suppose the film isn't offensive, however cringeworthy its toyetic motive proved to be.
Whenever I revisit the EqG movies, I usually just skip straight to Rainbow Rocks. It's astonishing how that movie managed to turn this spin-off right around.
Just as one example of the spurious plotting here: the Element of Magic is part of one of Equestria's most powerful peacekeeping defences at this point. The stakes are pretty high if Twilight fails to get it or herself back within the tight time limit.
DeleteSo of course, she spends most of the movie playing along to a popularity contest for teens.
You see the problem here?
Just one of many dumb ideas in this movie! It lays groundwork for better movies and specials to come, but I feel like those worked despite the original Equestria Girls, and not because of it.
DeleteThey also never really decide how important the Element of Magic actually is. On the one hand it's absolutely vital, at-all-costs vital, to get it back before the portal closes for "thirty moons" (a nebulous concept at best when the Moon can be raised and lowered at will by one of your friends). On the other hand, in the final confrontation Twilight insists that Equestria would find a way to survive without the Element. Make your mind up, girl!
DeleteSo yeah, it's a silly, dumb, rickety movie. It just happens to be that it hits my own personal kind of soft spot for silly, dumb fun just enough to get it over the line. For me.
To be fair, Equestria Girls in general impressively captures the same goofy spirit of innocent fun its sister series has, and that's one of the things that drew me into it. Even waste-of-time stuff further down the road, like "Rollercoaster of Friendship", has enough of that for me to enjoy revisiting it (e.g. Pinkie's "fun inspector" job, which turns out to actually be a thing).
DeleteIt's just, in this particular instance, I find the structural problems and awkward setup way too distracting to properly enjoy it.
I have so little personal investment in EqG that I haven't even bothered to rewatch this one.
ReplyDeleteI have no new observations - like Impossible Numbers noted, the tonal mismatch between "generic high school teen movie popularity contest" and "world-risking ticking clock to get back the crown" is true tonal whiplash. Sunset may have elements that intrigue viewers here, but it's all in the backstory, not in what she does onscreen throughout the film. I suppose it's good she got much better down the line, even though I could never quite buy her voice coming from either a high schooler (too old sounding!) or a pony.
The fandom nods are kind of eh and all over the place, and except the Cafeteria Song, I struggle to even remember the musical numbers at all (though I oddly do have the unused credits song committed to memory quite heavily).
And then there's the premise. Whatever the merits the franchise later achieved, it's still a really bad AU premise, clearly just Hasbro muscling in on Barbie and Monster High territory. Thankfully, even in this rickety, weak movie its better than those dumpster fires. But it is one of a few reasons why, even when EqG is better then FiM (and that happens more than a few times during the last four years of FiM!) I still have little personal connection to it.
The plot fares a little better then that - given it replicates much of the FiM series Premiere in setting up the Mane 5, but in a way that works only for familiar viewers (this is for FiM fans only!), it actually improves on that pilot's structure due to more screen time and being able to skip past certain obligatory elements. IT's also weird but interesting how there's actually a Mane 5 imbalance due to the plot here, being one of the few times Fluttershy is among the most prominent in an ensemble, with Rainbow Dash being among the least, not appearing in the flesh until halfway through the movie.
We all know no one involved intended for this to be more then a single spin-off film, at least by the time the script was locked (why else would the way back to Equestria be shut, only to be reopened for plot contrivance the very next film?). From Rainbow Rocks onwards, the franchise was actually allowed to plan and structure itself knowing there would be more to come. Combined with a lot of other reasons, this film feels separate from the rest of EqG (I mean, villain and reformed Sunset are basically two different characters).
It's not terrible - unlike the franchises Hasbro sought to copycat, Meghan and the DHX staff still care about the characters and what they go through enough that effort and care is present even in this, so it is watchable, more so then a decent shake of the last few years of FiM. Still, it's but a footnote to a more respectable era of EqG at this point.
It's a rickety mish-mash, indeed. It's just (for me, at least) a surprisingly entertaining rickety mish-mash. :D
DeleteI mean... yes. I agree. And yet I still have a soft spot for it, and not just because of what it later wrought.
ReplyDeleteIt's a mess, really, with the aforementioned jarring clash of Generic Teen High School Drama and Actual World-Threatening Drama, plus plot holes you could drive a (school) bus through. And it suffers like any long-form adaptation in not having enough things for all the main characters to do - not so much of an issue in hindsight, but at the time I didn't know there were any more EQG projects in the future, or the MLP movie, and so this felt like the only chance to see some of the Mane 6 was largely wasted.
BUT. The "season 3.5" frame story is good, an excellent bridge between the very end of 3 and the start of 4. I've seen lots written about how Magical Mystery Cure should really be considered the first episode of a trilogy that also takes in both parts of Princess Twilight Sparkle, especially since some of Larson's ideas for the former were moved to the latter, and I agree with that. However, thematically, it makes sense to me that Twilight gets to have the solo adventure she didn't get to have in MMC, just some time reminding herself what she's capable of while processing the idea of added responsibility. If it doesn't exactly plug the gap from the drastically truncated MMC in terms of her actually "earning" her wings, it does give her additional on-screen time firstly to express her concerns, and then to accept the change in readiness for what we're about to see in the s4 premiere, even to learn an extra lesson (and from Human!Celestia to boot - "A true princess in any world leads not by forcing others to bow before her, but by inspiring others to stand with her" - which is the kind of advice "our" Celestia surely gave Twilight offscreen, but it's nice to see it explicitly set out). Plus, I'm always a sucker for just having some extra breathing space. Twilight's admission at the end that she's starting to get used to the crown is just a nice moment on a number of levels, in-story and meta.
Plus, right, I won't lie, even though I think the intro sequence is the weakest of the four EQG "movies" (probably because it doesn't have a bespoke song, and the titles animation now feels cheap and half-arsed), the first time I saw it it was *thrilling* to see Ponies - But On A Bigger Scale. (cont'd)
I always liked DWK's observation that, despite being vehemently against the idea when the concept art and dolls were unveiled, about halfway through watching this he realised to his surprise that he was having fun. I feel the same way in that a lot of the backlash (which I only saw years after the fact, of course) seemed a little bit... *off*, really, given we'd already won the battle to admit to ourselves, if not everyone in our lives, that it was OK to like a show aimed at selling toy horses to little girls. It seemed an odd leap to say "well, I may have somehow become an adult fan of My Little Pony thanks to this fresh and wonderful take on what could have been a cataclysmically hokey dumpster fire, taking a patently bad idea and making it work... but a spin-off selling *human* dolls? Too far, Hasbro, I won't be giving THAT the benefit of the doubt!" Again, hindsight helps here, as knowing what was to come (including some of my favourite moments from the entire G4 franchise) unavoidably and completely changes the focus on rewatching this first tentative step, and of all the various EQG efforts it's one of the things I've gone back to the least often (despite me and my daughter watching the DVD about a hundred times back when it was one of the only MLP G4 DVDs available), but I think it holds up about as well now as it did then, for whatever that's worth.
DeleteOh, also! Unlike most other people who've commented, I actually really like the songs. Perhaps that's largely because at the time I was getting into the show, the only official MLP soundtrack album was missing lots of songs from the show itself and so me and my daughter contented ourselves with the EQG soundtrack mini-album to bulk out the playlist over many long car and train journeys, but I'm as familiar with things like Time to Come Together and This Is Our Big Night as with any other MLP song proper, but I'm confident I could sing both of them back to you right now if you asked me. Possibly with accompanying father-daughter dance moves.
I think part of the resistance to it was just how crudely tacked-on the High School AU concept was, and to a show that, up till now, had worked perfectly fine as its own entity.
DeleteMyself, I found that the later EqG media felt more engaging when it acted as its own independent world to flesh out than when it kept drawing attention to the pony-AU aspect.
Not that seeing Sunset meet Celestia again, or having the Battle of the Bands force Twilight out of her comfort zone, weren't entertaining in their own right. I just personally felt it was despite the worldbuilding clunkiness, rather than because of it.
I've not got a lot to add to this one. It's dumb fun that is clearly a mess in several ways yet nevertheless I have an enormous soft spot for. Three stars is maybe a little generous, but only a little.
ReplyDeleteI do like the Cloptimist's observation about how well this one acts as a bridge between Series 3 and 4, following directly on from Twilight growing her wings. One thing that I've always thought is somewhat funny in hindsight is the lengths Twilight goes to in this film to recover her crown only to give it up in the very next story!
Three stars is maybe a little generous, but only a little.
DeleteFair. It might have ended up a high two, but I had just about a good enough time with it on the rewatch not to shove it down a category. It wasn't a foregone conclusion, though.
I thought it was cute enough, but the plot didn't hang together very well. I remember noting that even though the CMCs appear, they don't get any speaking parts, which seemed like an obvious "we don't want to pay more VAs than we have to" thing. It was very similar to various show episodes to me where it had its cute moments but not much else going for it. The thing that continued to bug me through the rest of EqG is how there's little to no interaction of the CMCs with their big sisters. Since they all wear something akin to cutie marks, it makes me wonder how that works, too. Kids don't develop a compulsion to wear some symbol until after they realize what their talent is? And then it was also odd to me that you only see Derpy's bubbles on a couple occasions: at the battle of the bands and in the "Life is a Runway" short.
ReplyDelete(Pedantic mode: the CMCs *do* get a couple of lines, misinterpreting the mean comments on their YouTube video.)
DeleteAny possible explanation of cutie marks in the Not Quite Earth Equestria Girls World only causes a series of deep and highly confusing questions as soon as it's examined in any detail at all, which is presumably why none of the writers ever dug into it. I did like the Human!CMCs still being friends across dimensional boundaries even though without their special life defining talents and becoming the Canterlot Movie Club, I do admit.
It was a three-star event for me when I first saw it (mainly because of the novelty), but it's lost ground since.
ReplyDeleteThe movie took me from a world full of magic and adventure to Generic Teen High School Drama Land. Twilight went from an intelligent young monarch to a Generic Dumb Teen. (I guess the transformation affected her brain as well as her hooves.)
Everyone seems to like Rainbow Rocks much better, and I admit it was better written and more cohesive. But again, its only merit in my eyes was borrowed magic from Equestria.
After that, I only watched the bits of EQG that had ponies in. I don't think I missed much.
It's lost a little ground for me since -- in old terms, I gave it 7/10 at the time (a solid three stars) and would now give it 6/10 (a bare three stars). I don't think I'll ever love the EqG stuff the way I love FiM, but I do like it a good deal more than I thought I would seven years ago.
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