 |
| This sequence lasts a few seconds and has no dialogue, but it says so much |
Written by Meghan McCarthy
27 Sep 2014 (limited US/Canada release)
My original rating: 8.5/10 (=★★★★)
IMDb score: 7.0
The one with Derpy playing the saw
Thoughts: The official name of this film is (deep breath!) My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks. Nobody uses it, so I won't either. It's the most popular of all the four EqG films and often seen as the best. Is it still? Well, I don't know yet! However, it undoubtedly is a great watch. The songs are unsurprisingly the centrepiece, and the way Daniel Ingram ups the quality as the movie goes on – something which is directly story-relevant – is really impressive. The "Welcome to the Show" sequence sticks in the mind of course, though it really does need the accompanying visuals for full effect. The end-credit song "Shine Like Rainbows", though, is one of my very favourite songs in any of the official Pony productions. (The wonderful character drawings that appear during the end credits are by
Katrina Hadley. I still haven't forgiven Hasbro for not producing prints
of them!) The Sirens are really pretty good villains, and their creepy seductiveness is surprisingly strongly portrayed for a kids' movie (all that hair-stroking in "Battle of the Bands", for one) but this is really Sunset Shimmer's film. Indeed, it is her redemption story, and you cheer for her by the end. In one movie she managed to become a big fandom favourite, a position she has never relinquished. Yes, the underlying plot is still a little on the clichéd side, but when it's all this enjoyable, who really cares? It looks good, it sounds fantastic, we get (for the last time in the movie series) more than a glimpse of actual ponies, the characters are fun, there's shipteasing for those who want it (LyraBon in "Under Our Spell", which feels slightly different now given FiM canon developments since) and the post-credits teaser introduces us to Sci-Twi. I awarded Rainbow Rocks a top-end four in 2014, and I'm giving it the same assessment today. I would happily pay to watch this film in the cinema again.
Choice quote: Celestia: "Please do not drop the microphones."
New rating: ★★★★
Next in this series, I'll be looking at the three musical shorts that appeared out of nowhere on 1st April 2015. What a day that was!
Speaking of those prints, aren't they the ones Daedalus Aegle just blogged about, or were they different images?
ReplyDeleteNo, assuming you're referring to this post they're different images. I mean these drawings. (Plus one of Derpy and one of the CMC.) I remember Hadley tweeting at some point that making the RR ones available was Hasbro's call, not hers.
DeleteMind you, the prints she is selling would be over $60 each once you account for shipping costs, so I couldn't have afforded a set anyway.
Plus one of Spike. So ten pictures in total, I think: the HuMane Five, Twilight, Spike, Sunset, the CMC and Derpy. I may have forgotten someone!
DeleteEasily my favourite of all Equestria Girls media.
ReplyDeleteThe Dazzlings remind me a lot of the cornier 80s/90s cartoons, where the teammates on the good or evil team each have one trait per character (the determined leader, the affable/dumb one, the apathetic one) and bicker most of the time, but collectively make for an effective opposition. Actually, the Dazzlings remind me more strongly of the Azula-Mai-Ty Lee team in the more recent show Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I'm willing to regard that as a neat coincidence. I quite like them as a straightforward villainous threat, not just because we get to marvel at how they (mostly Adagio) plan, counter-plan, manipulate, and aim higher as the story goes on, but because it doesn't distract from the complicated stuff around Twilight and Sunset.
Speaking of which: funny how the least-talked-about aspect is actually central to understanding this one? I mean Twilight's role in it, especially as a follow-up to last time.
Just as Sunset's feeling underqualified to speak out for most of the movie (in a neat touch, she's less focused-upon early on as a meta-level reflection of her initial uncertainty in the group), so Twilight is convinced she's in way over her head here. It's a tidy parallelism, naturally drawing events to the "passing of the torch" by the end of the movie and paving the way for Sunset to redeem Sci-Twi in the next one.
After all, in PonyWorld, Twilight just got her castle and something of a resolution to her purpose-seeking arc. What happens here? She's thrown in the deep end and convinced she's the only one who can help, but also convinced she can't do it. You know, throughout these rewatches, I've grown to appreciate more Twilight's self-chastizing perfectionistic character arc, not only because it keeps her relatable, but because it seems more and more that McCarthy had some grand plan in mind over the last few dozen instalments. And Twilight struggles every step of the way. It's kind of inspirational, in a way.
Meanwhile, I'll never get over how quickly Sunset was redeemed in the last one, but for what it had to work with, her rehabilitation and then near-ascension at the end remains a treat.
And yes, "Shine Like Rainbows" is finale-worthy goodness and I love it. n.n
You know, despite this being the best EqG film, prior to today, I think I'd only seen it in full once, and I'd never rewatched clips that much. Even for my general personal interest in EqG being minuscule compared to FiM, it's paradoxical that the best film remained the least vivid in my mind.
ReplyDeleteBright side being, large chunks were quite fresh on the rewatch for me this time. Which was nice, in a small way.
What is there to add at this stage? The musical numbers are really quite solid, such a relief after the first film produced one standout among several forgettable numbers. Though given the plot requirements and the sabotage-y nature to some, and the intentionally bad quality of others, they're so tied to their experience in the film that few are satisfactory standalone listening experience (to be fair, "Pinkie Pride" has the same thing, as its song mostly rely on the wacky visuals for full impact). And "Shine Like Rainbows", the one exception to this, is also the standout - even if I don't consider it one of the best songs G4 ever produced, it's certainly top-notch, and without a doubt the best credits songs in G4 (sorry "Rainbow" and "Hope Shines Eternal", you're both still quite solid).
Though I'm not too personally fond of them, as once-off villains, the Dazzlings do their job effectively, and get the exact right amount of screentime and scenes to make a solid, threatening impression without taking away from our leads. And I actually noted other pushing-it content moments beyond their mild creepy seductiveness - there were a few cases of mild insults like "idiot" that the show never goes near (granted, that was mostly the Dazzlings berating each other).
As Impossible Numbers noted, when put in the context of the show at the time, Twilight's role and arc here is truly quite something - I'll simply concur with his points and add that it all makes for the ONLY worthwhile case of the EqG media being canon to FiM - indeed, if Meghan hadn't been taken off the show for the 2017 Movie around this time, and had been able to continue whatever her loose plans for Twilight were, I'd even advocate for it myself!
And while I do have a capstone on my enthusiasm for Sunset due to the spin-off she's tied to, her arc and story here is still wonderful - of all the half-baked "reformations" across this whole franchise, hers remains the only one to triumph over its shaky start and produce worthwhile results. Better then worthwhile - one needs to fudge the details a little and apple some headcanon, but her gradual arc over the movies and specials is a surprisingly realistic and nuanced depiction of a reformation.
Of course, even with this best EqG movie, there's the usual set of problems that hold it back - the convoluted franchise setup, the ghastly character designs, the mismatched tone between jokes and plot in many scenes, and like most McCarthy works from this era, the abundance of magic doing what the plot calls for when it calls for it, with no attempt to hide it. Though this one is remarkably free from toyetic plugs, beyond the EqG brand in general, so that's nice.
And the structure grinds along in a very TV-Movie mode. There was a point at the 21 minute mark, after Twilight read the journal message, when the background music did a cliffhanger-type rising note, and coupled with the cut to near-black (back of a book before it's pulled out of a shelf), it really highlighted for me how these movies are, structurally, just three episodes, even if there's no built-in commercial breaks. Maybe that's not an issue for some. But it's worth noting - unlike the 2017 movie, no EqG film feels like it's not just 3 TV episodes in one body.
Is Rainbow Rocks great enough to justify this spin-off's existence? Not quite, but pretty close! Even if I rarely want to revisit this, I concur with its placement as the best EqG film.
I liked this movie quite a bit, and while the Dazzlings are so one-dimensional in their appearance, they did set up nice blank slates that fanfic authors have done great things with. Then you have Vinyl at the end foreshadowing the Transformers comics crossover. Oddly enough, I'd already planned to have Derpy be a saw player before this movie came out, but I'd changed my mind to harmonica by that time. This is definitely the Sunset redemption arc that the first movie was missing, and it has time to make it happen. Good all-around movie. Plus Sonata is adorable.
ReplyDelete