Originally posted at the DL April 2015
And so we come to My Little Barbie.
So… when you go back to the resurgence of American animation in the 80s, basically what you find is that the Regan administration happened to loosen up a lot of the laws on programming aimed at children, meaning it was actually possible to make 22 minute toy commercials where it hadn’t been for something like 20 years (I’ve never formally looked up the laws involved, so don’t quote me on that, but I have seen just enough pre-60’s cartoons to know they had the same marketing bent as the Hasbro lines in the 80s). What happened through the 90s, and we can almost directly attribute this to Batman TAS (although Warner Animation in general was responsible since other contributing factors were Tiny Toons/Animaniacs) is that cartoonists decided to make stuff they could be proud of and enjoy. The relationship shifted from the toy line telling them what needed to be in the show and the writers going “uh sure we can work that in” to picking and choosing what elements they could expand on and make good while taking elements that weren’t fully workable and finding ways to marginalize them.
Equestria Girls has two major problems, and the foremost goes back to that concept. Hasbro said to themselves “hey, other companies are actually finding a market niche for knockoff Barbies, we can finally get in on that action.” Then some marketing team went over their properties and said “Yup, Friendship in Magic is by FAR the one that’ll draw the most money”, at which point they went to the writers who went “uh sure we can work that in”. The whole thing is very jackhammered into the setting and comes off as very artificial because of it. The idea seems to have been to try and wink at the audience enough to get them to brush it off, hence spending most of the movie on weird “yeaaah Twilight totally think she’s still a pony, hands are hard guys” humor. And even then you had them clearly struggling with things like how to work 7 distinct outfits for each primary character into the movie with highlight scenes for each as dictated by marketing.
"Sure we can work that in" creates the second problem though, the rest of the cast is the same as the pony cast… pre character development. The human cast has issues that would have been strained and backslide-y even in season 1, which logically follows because late-teenaged ponies are clearly full-fledged members of society in Equestria while in human land they’re, y’know, teenagers. But being logically viable doesn’t make it any more fun to watch. And sure, this is partly a personal thing; more developed characters can be placed in more sophisticated stories, I’m a sucker for ongoing continuity in my children’s cartoons, I dunno what to say there.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. They made good use of the movie to address a small but important bit of Twilight’s season 4 arc and kick off her development ‘off-screen’ as it were. It’s a doubt that has no real basis in reality, but that logically someone in her situation would have, and wouldn’t really be able to seek advice from her friends or mentor because it was so internal. Thrust into a new situation as she was gave her an opportunity to learn the lesson on her own. More important of course was Sunset Shimmer, who actually has a different dynamic for a character on the show and ties bits of the movie together that otherwise would just flounder. I’m mostly glad I saw both existing movies before writing this up, because knowing that the next focuses more on her, and realistically what’s probably going to happen is she becomes the ‘main’ character of the human world stories going forward means they stand a good chance of being distinct but still quality.
Grade: 5/10. While the seeds for a decent story are here, and they’re used better in the next movie, this one is overall somewhat tedious and never really comes together.
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