Sunday 4 September 2011

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Yep, I did in fact watch this series all the way through. Yes it is a cartoon about ponies made for little girls with bright colours. But you know what? I like it, so shuddup!

There are many a reason why I like My Little Pony, the first thing I noticed was, as a fan of Animation, the series itself was very pleasing to look at, there were a lot of bright colours to amuse me, the characters themselves have incredibly simple yet great designs, and the actual animation itself was very smooth and varied ,such as the Ponies quadrupedic movement being very believable while still allowing for the occaisional anthropomorphism like holding objects with their front hooves on occaision. Though I was initially bugged by the fact that it has the telltale sign of being animated in Adobe Flash and looks like a webseries rather than a full TV series with a team of animators, but it works with the series.

The second reason I like this cartoon is that the creator, Lauren Faust (Previously involved in Powerpuff Girls and other stuff.) was a fan of the original series, but still thought it had huge room for improvement, which are important things to think during a reboot, you have to respect the series for what it was but still update it to modern values. This is why, in my opinion, series 5-6 of the new Doctor Who is much better written, because the creator loves the series, but knows it isn't perfect. Lots of the humour appears very self-aware and reminded me of cartoons such as Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Freakazoid.

The humour itself, to say it's written to make the target demographic of young girls laugh, are actually very funny. My favorite joke in the entire series is in one episode, where a horse drawn carriage is being ridden by another horse, the pulling horse then remarks "It's your turn to pull now.", made me actually laugh out loud. There are also a lot of jokes that could not possibly have been written for the target audience, such as the fact that one of the main characters names was unmistakably a jab at the Twilight series, or one scene which is a reference to Benny Hill, which can't have been seen by its audience, or another scene that seems to reference '2001' of all films.

And last but not least, the series, despite the title, is not overly girly, or even remotely girly, there are many episodes where the main cast could be replaced by male characters and the plot wouldn't be affected. And in addition, it isn't overly kiddy either, for the reasons mentioned above, as well as the fact that the overall message of each episode doesn't generally talk down to kids and never seems shoehorned in.

Well, that's my opinion on that, ad like many other fans, I await with baited breath for Series 2 to come out.

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