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My Little Pony: Classic Movie Collection

Score: 70%
Rating: G
Publisher: Shout! Factory
Region: 1
Media: DVD/2
Running Time: 114 Mins.
Genre: Animated
Audio: 5.1 Dolby Digital
Subtitles: Closed Captioned for the Hearing
           Impaired


Features:

  • Sing-alongs

The movies included in this collection are "The Princess Promenade," "Dancing in the Clouds," "The Runaway Rainbow," and "Friends are Never Far Away." With 4 movies, you get a lot here, but it’s mostly quantity over quality as far as animation and plot. There actually are some catchy tunes here and there. "The Princess Promenade" has some nice ones in the scenes where the Breezies (Fairy folk of the Pony world) get together to help the Ponies. Sing-alongs are also the DVD’s only special feature.

These 4 movies will give you the general feel for Generation 3 pony movies. This is the generation of My Little Pony toys that came right before this current generation and the very popular My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic line. So how does a G3 movie generally go? The ponies crash into something, they laugh. They plan parties. They plan dances. They plan celebrations. Sometimes they play games and participate in leisurely activities such as flying kites and riding roller coasters. It’s an economy of fun, really. It may sound like fun, but don’t anticipate a fun time while watching these movies. The bright colors and lightness of everything might make it tolerable to the under 6 age group, but there's not much depth for anyone over that age.

As for plot, don’t expect much difference between this and any of the other G3 movies such as "A Very Minty Christmas." It’s like the inanity of Axe Cop but without all the fun or quality animation. Yes, these movies could have been written by a couple of 7 year olds, but I wouldn’t subject kids to them if I could help it. Take "The Princess Promenade" for example. The movie starts with the Breezies going over to help the Ponies put on a parade. Think flowers and more flowers. Wysteria, the main Pony in charge of the festival, accidentally awakens a sleeping dragon, Spike. Discovering a dragon sounds exciting, except their main concern is giving him a bath. After the bath, Spike reveals that his duty, after a thousand year sleep, is to make a princess out of Wysteria. Wysteria discovers she doesn’t like being a princess because it means she basically can’t do any of things she loves like gardening, designing, and smelling flowers. It also means she can’t have friends, as she’s supposed to be better than her subjects. I suppose with random rules like that, no one would really get into the whole princess thing. So what’s her solution to the problem? She makes all of her friends princesses too. Alright, the message is supposed to be that Wysteria wants everyone to be equals and friends, but all I see is a growing circle of elite ponies that need not answer to anyone. Yeah, I’m kidding. That would probably be a more interesting movie though.

To sum up the other movies, "Dancing in the Clouds" follows the story of Sky Wishes and her friend, Twinkle Twirl, as they work together to put on a dance. This movie, along with "Friends Are Never Far Away" seemed to have slightly more detailed artwork in comparison to the others. There are details like Rainbow Dash having rainbow colored irises that don’t show up in the other movies. "The Runaway Rainbow" follows another celebration. Here’s where you’ll see the freakish (to current gen fans) pink version of Rarity. Unicorns are responsible for creating rainbows in this world. Rarity decides to goof off, instead of learning how to create rainbows, so this threatens the existence of rainbows for the year, which is apparently a big deal. Finally there’s "Friends Are Never Far Away," which shows the moment when the ponies finally meet the shy pegasus ponies.

Every once in a while, I start looking at the art style instead of trying to ignore it, and I notice awesome things like random light sources. Seriously, pick one light source in a scene and stick to it. Line thickness is all over the place too, without any rhyme or reason. Then there are little lumpy dots in the outlines of characters. It’s like someone with no experience ran it through a line trace in a design program and accepted the default output. Sometimes the thickness changes during animation randomly as well. At one point, Spike is speaking and his cheek goes from thick to thin over and over during the speaking animation. I usually go back to trying to ignore the art style.

I imagine some poor kids are going to get this as a gift because someone heard that they like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. That could turn out badly. Don’t go into this expecting Friendship is Magic and you’ll do much better. Look at it as exactly what it is: a bunch of over-sweet, fluff movies. These movies are decent enough for a leisurely afternoon, but don't expect them to become favorites.



-Fights with Fire, GameVortex Communications
AKA Christin Deville

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