I'm undecided about to what extent and for how long I should treat all G5 stuff as spoilery. On one hoof I really don't think it's realistic to avoid every single mention of G5 for the next seven months, but on the other hoof I don't want to annoy people who are hoping to be surprised. As such, my plan for a while at least will be to use spoiler-cuts here. So...
Link to the G5 picture, plus my thoughts on it, after the page break!
A couple of days ago, someone noticed an interesting bedding set on a Czech website. It's still up there, even though searching for "My Little Pony" there no longer shows the pic. Do we know this is official? No. Can we suspect that this is official? Yes. Since I'm no industry expert, I'll rely on some fairly simple reasoning rather than anything more intricate:
1) Hasbro's official announcement is in just a few days, so you'd expect the reveal would be ready by then.
2) This website has sold officially licensed stuff for a while. They'd be most unlikely to risk that relationship by selling knock-off products.
3) The art style is close enough to Imalou's that it's reasonable to suspect it is Imalou's, with some changes perhaps requested by Hasbro. And we know Imalou is a Character Designer at Boulder who's working on the film.
4) I'm told (though haven't checked) that the word "everypony" is a Hasbro trademark. It's used here.
5) The website lists release date as September 2021. The same month as the film.
6) It just... looks like a My Little Pony thing, allowing for the change of generations.
Frankly, at this point I will be really quite startled if this isn't the real thing. So what do I think? Well... it's okay. Inoffensive. Can't say it grabs me like the FiM characters did even before I'd watched the show, but it's okay. Colour palette for the bodies is too samey for my liking, but who knows what the other ponies look like?
On top of that, it's worth bearing in mind that if all you'd ever seen of Friendship is Magic was a couple of the early Hasbro vectors, you might not be too enthused either. In reality, those weren't a fair reflection of what the characters looked like in their home environment. That may well be the case here too. I guess we'll find out!
From an artist's viewpoint the designs are... regressing to the mean, if that makes sense. Lauren's style pushed away from the soft-edged pastels that was de rigueur for "girl's" shows, toward a more Flash appearance.
ReplyDeleteThese (from the small sample) seem to have had the edges filed off and generally been fluffed up a bit. Different, but not necessarily bad.
As an artist, I hate to admit it, but the real determinative factor will be the writing. Strong story can uplift mediocre art, but fantastic art can't rescue a crap story.
We'll just have to wait and see.
Seconding the "regressing to the mean" thing. The colors especially are very middle of the color wheel, blended pastels rather than bold primaries. The designs also don't tell me anything about the characters, but then no one should really expect a single out of context vector to do that. :B
DeleteThey remind me just a little bit of G3 ponies, though that feeling may reduce once we've seen them in motion and once we know how representative this first picture actually is. I don't actually hate the various G3 designs (other than... well, you know) but I don't love them either.
DeleteAs you say, though, how well they're written will make or break them, if not (so much) for the target audience then at least for us old fogeys. If FiM had been doing "Non-Compete Clause" from the start, I doubt I'd have even begun writing this blog as I doubt I'd have been in the fandom more than incidentally in the first place.
The new 3D pic looks a lot better than the 2D! The story description makes me cringe a bit, though.
DeleteI'll make a post about the info in a day or two, but for now I'm okay with the story description. It's hardly going to make anyone think, "Wow, how excitingly original!" but I can live with it if it's executed well.
DeleteMy only opinion so far is one I also saw leveled against the previous movie, which is that the character design felt even less horse-shaped than the show did. I like G4's aesthetic better than all previous generations, where character faces were most definitely horse-shaped, but it's nice to still have some horsiness in there. But the movie downplayed the shape of their faces even more, to the point they were almost human faces. Only Tempest had a pronounced snout to her, so that how it moved when she talked or wore an expression really had to take that snout into account, whereas everyone else really didn't. While I otherwise don't mind these new designs, I do wish the faces hadn't gone the more human direction that eh previous movie did.
ReplyDeleteGood point on this company not wanting to annoy Hasbro with knockoffs, but then I'm also surprised they just decoupled it from a "My Little Pony" label and didn't take it down altogether, at least until Hasbro's made a public reveal.
Yes, that's true: it does seem rather odd that, given Equestria Daily was asked to take down the picture (and did so), the company hosting it in the first place was not.
Delete