Movie Thoughts: My Little Pony: Winter Wishday (2022)

 

• Released: November 21, 2022
• Directed by: William Lau
  
• Running time: 44 min
• Rating 2/5

Synopsis

The mane five celebrate their first Winter Wish holiday together, however they soon find that they each have slightly different plans and traditions regarding the holiday. They set up a schedule to be able to participate in everyone's own traditions just in time. Meanwhile, the winter snow turns to out to be more intense than initially anticipated.

My Thoughts

Like I promised in my review of season one of Make Your Mark, I'm going to be reviewing the "special" episodes of the series as moves under my Movie Thoughts label. The Make Your Mark series has a somewhat weird way of releasing episodes of the series, with some being entire seasons and others being one-episode 45-minutes long specials. Makes it pretty hard for me to find a logical way to review it, but here's what I'm going to do. Long special: Movie Thoughts review. Actual drop of a bunch of new episodes: Series Thoughts season review. Hope that makes sense. Also, I know I haven't reviewed the first Make Your Mark special yet. I'm getting to it. Someday.

Plot of Winter Wishday is pretty much as I described. Our five colorful horses each have their unique ways of celebrating the holiday, so they set up a schedule in which they can all partake in each other's traditions and activities just in time to see the Wishing Star the holiday was named for. But they start to run out of time, especially when the snow becomes much more intense.

Not sure how I feel about this one, but generally (like the rest of Make Your Mark so far) I wasn't too fond of it. I do not mind the smaller scale plot, but the special did feel a bit rushed. I feel that just a few more minutes could've done wonders for the pacing. 

The final conclusion of what was causing the snow's intensity also wasn't all that fantastic. It turns out that the unicorns have been (subconsciously) casting a spell the entire time causing it to snow more than usual. And it's fine, but like, the conflict is so small I didn't particularly care, especially since the characters aren't that great, either. 

The invention of the Marestream (basically a plane) also came a bit out of nowhere. It'd make sense that with the updated technology in this series there'd be something like it eventually, but the way the Marestream came about was a bit too convenient. 

There were elements I did enjoy here, however. I liked the animation (it was better than in the first special and season), there were some neat moments/characters in Bridlewood (Alphabittle re-appears and there's a mildly funny bit involving a poetic unicorn named Onyx). The music also wasn't bad and I do like these characters getting to spend their holidays together after years of their respective tribes having been separated for ages. And each character does (briefly) get their own time to shine, which is nice.

But overall it wasn't really anything to write home about. So far the writing and characters in Make Your Mark have been too weak for me to really care about the property. Friendship is Magic sure had a few poorly-written episodes as well, but overall the quality was much better and the characters much more defined and three-dimensional than here. 

I'm still going to continue watching and reviewing the Make Your Mark series/specials for now, but if they really do not improve after a while I may just have to call a quits because so far it's not really doing anything for me. It's not even offensively or actively bad, making it fun to review at least. It's just "meh" and uninteresting so far, which are sometimes honestly just the hardest reviews to write.