Brief thoughts on My Little Pony: A New Generation

This was originally a casual, off-the-cuff review posted to Tumblr, in which I pondered the hamfisted political allegory of a movie about talking horses.

Hi. I watched the new My Little Pony movie, and it was… pretty good! It was very cute, I like the new cast a lot, there were some nice heartfelt moments that had some surprising depth, all the locations were really pretty to look at, the poppy musical numbers were fun, the character animation is really lively. It’s a solid little fantasy adventure flick for kids. I do have mixed feelings about the story, though. Here are some casual-ish thoughts. (I posted some of this on Twitter last night, but I have even more thoughts now. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry)

Okay, so, I liked it a lot when it was just letting the new characters play off each other, but unfortunately my fears came true and almost the entire movie is laser focused on the oversimplified extremely on-the-nose Trump era racism allegory plot. I do have to cut it some slack for their good intentions, and this is a 90-minute animated movie for 5-year-olds, so there’s only so much they can do. It did also have a bit more nuance than I expected at points. (It’s more nuanced than Zootopia, for what it’s worth. Not that that’s hard.) And hell, Friendship is Magic also screwed up its attempts at similar topics, and y'all know how much I still love that show. So it’s not like I hate this movie. But it has such an oversimplified “We should all be friends!” take on real issues, and it frustrates me that it completely dominates the film, being the main focus of almost every single scene.

There’s some interesting stuff where they show how those in power are stoking peoples’ fears to maintain their own power. The big factory in the earth pony town is essentially an arms manufacturer capitalizing on the fear of outsiders. Their cops mainly exist to uphold the laws segregating the ponies. And the pegasus royal family pretends they still have the ability to fly, and this lie seems to be the only reason they’re in power. (The queen literally gets arrested the second the truth comes out lol). But then they all just kind of… see the error of their ways shortly after meeting other types of pony, and there are no repercussions? Not saying this toy commercial cartoon for little girls needs to fuckin' kill the bad guys or throw them in jail or whatever, but we don’t even get like a “they made them turn the arms factory into something else” type resolution, and no one even really acknowledges that these characters did anything wrong. No one is considered an oppressor. The movie takes for granted that these people in power, who derive their power from bigotry, were just misguided, and that they’ll totally change their beliefs as soon as they’re presented with new information. Society is fundamentally unjust, but none of the individuals maintaining that unjust status quo are at fault for doing so.

I also don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that there’s no explanation for why the ponies hate each other now. On the one hand, at least there’s no historical backstory that inadvertently justifies the prejudices (like Zootopia and its story about how the predators used to eat the prey). But on the other hand… how the hell did they get from G4 to here in the intervening centuries? At my most uncharitable, it feels like this whole story about how Equestria used to be this land where everyone got along and now everyone is divided is a heavy-handed metaphor for The Sudden Division Of America In The Trump Era as it’s perceived by a lot of liberals. History didn’t logically lead us to this point, no one is really at fault, everyone just arbitrarily started hating each other at some point and we just all need to put that aside and get along again. It’s almost the FiM episode about how the cowboys and the natives should just learn to share all over again. (Again: I will admit this is an uncharitable read of the film.)

(Sidebar with big spoilers: The very end also really bugged me, but that’s more just a personal taste thing. In the leadup to G5, I was excited to see them make an earth pony the protagonist. I thought that was a nice change of pace after nine seasons of Twilight. But then in the end of the movie, after Sunny delivers the moral, she’s magically turned into an alicorn… like, oh, we’re just doing that again, huh? Okay. It also doesn’t really gel with this story where the different types of pony are being used for a racism/xenophobia allegory.)

I feel a little bad hyper-focusing on the way the allegory falls apart like this, but like. The allegory is the entire fucking movie lol. They are constantly talking about it in every scene. The first song mentions “building a wall,” the main antagonist (who may or may not be intended to evoke Trump?) manipulates the earth ponies’ prejudices to make them all go full fascist, etc. It is not subtle. Of course, this story isn’t ALL bad - the adventures along the way were fun, I was relieved when everyone realized that the McGuffin wouldn’t magically make everyone get along again (although realizing this DOES make the McGuffin restore everyone’s magic which seems to mostly fix everything, so… lol), and a message about looking past stereotypes and misinformation to befriend people who are different from you definitely isn’t a bad one for a kids’ film. And obviously a story with this target demographic is ALWAYS going to have to simplify reality a bit. It’s just extremely obvious that they wanted to go for a nuanced topical political story that would surprise the parents in the audience and maybe teach kids a thing or two, and it turned out messy.

But again, I liked the characters. It was nice to look at. It was cute. I’ll gladly watch a new show with these characters. I hope the inevitable show focuses less on this political allegory though lol

Anyway there’s a shot of Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash in the opening scene so 10/10

Since writing this informal review, I've seen the first set of episodes of A New Generation's followup series and written a longer, more formal review about that, which you can read here.