Movie Thoughts: My Little Pony: The Movie (1986)

• Released: June 6 1986
• Directed by: Michael Joens
• Running time: 1 h 26 min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

The ponies of Paradise Estate must band together in order to defeat a villainous trio of witches that wishes to cover all of Ponyland in a purple goo. 

My Thoughts

Figured why not do an MT on this one as well. For the record, this is a review/thoughts of/on the G1 movie, not the recent 2017 one! I’ll probably do a review on that one later! Let’s get this party started.


Okay so to start with the characters … as is well known with th general G1 ones … yeah, they indeed do all have the personalities of cardboard. There is no depth to them and just do their thing. They may have quirks and likes/dislikes, but they never have a fully fledged personalities or character arcs. The closest we got to an arc here was probably Lickety Split running away at the start of the movie because she didn’t like how things were at her home, only to come around quite soon and realize that living out there while you’re just a foal is not for her. There’s also way too many characters in here for its own good. I get that they probably were just trying to shove in as many characters for toy sales as possible but…come on. This is practically later-Ice Age-sequels level character overkill. Some of them only have one or two lines and stuff. Just way too much.

The pacing is literally all over the place. The structure of this movie is a huge mess. We skip from character team to character team, sometimes with only very short amounts of time between each skip, and since there’s a great amount of characters it becomes too much pretty quickly. This movie really could’ve used some re-structuring. It just feels very rough and rushed this way.

The songs are just…not it. Not catchy and annoying more than anything. There’s also quite a few, so I really do think that some of them could’ve been shortened or maybe cut out altogether. It also doesn’t help that the segways into the songs are just nonexistent (characters will literally just start singing in what was a normal conversation prior to the song beginning). And yeah…these voices aren’t the greatest singing voices.

Talking about voices … eesh, the voice acting. It’s awful. The VA’s (voices) are either really grating, can’t act, sound horribly flat or emotionless, don’t seem to fit the characters, sound way too juvenile, etc. It’s just a mess and not pleasant to listen to at all. Uuuh Denny Devito is in it, though. That’s coolish I guess?

The animation is…quite bad. But it’s your average 80′s cartoon animation, so I’m not too mad at it. It didn’t exactly have a high budget or anything so…yeah. Don’t expect good animation here. It’s painfully eh.

Guess this wasn’t my thing. It hasn’t aged very well.

So yeah…this was..something. Just not recommended unless you really want to delve into MLP’s history or are horribly nostalgic for it (like me). I love G1 and G3 for nostalgia reasons only, otherwise there isn’t really much to offer other than maybe some cool world-building.