writ. by Meghan McCarthy, Rita Hsiao, and Michael Vogel
The appeal of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comes from a combination of factors. Aside from its lighthearted tone and cute art style, its characters are surprisingly three-dimensional, and its best episodes can be quite funny as well. This show's cult following didn't come out of nowhere, and much of it comes down to the show's main themes. To me, the most important part of Friendship is Magic's appeal is that so many of its stories revolve around the main characters needing to move past their own insecurities. This show does an excellent job with audience identification, even outside of the target audience, simply because it fleshes out its protagonists and treats them with empathy.
On the other hand, My Little Pony: The Movie is asinine and derivative, and while there's several factors in its overall sloppiness, perhaps the greatest is that it trades the show's stories of insecurity for slapdash adventure cliches, seemingly assembled at random. What little remains of the show's soul is scrambled by the slapdash execution, which is too busy hopping from formula beat to formula beat to sufficiently develop even one of its characters, and it's all brought down by a truly wretched sense of humour. Perhaps it would be difficult to make a My Little Pony movie which really taps into the show's main strengths, but on the other hand, there's no reason it had to be this bad.
(note: spoilers follow)
