My Little... Pony?

[strredwolf]

Okay, I have not watched the latest spin on this. No, I remember watching MLP with much better, conventional American animated style. It kept things nicely sized and in proportion, well within the toy series that Mattel was selling at the time. Here's the original series theme to give you a refresher.

You got to remember, the time I watched cartoons in 1980's or so, they were selling toys related to most of the cartoons. This included MLP, Transformers, and G.I. Joe.

Now, the cartoons return back to the main formula with the added job of being educational. This seemingly causes the artistic style to suffer:

Transformers goes from highly technical, classic Japanese anime to mutated spinoff interpretation. The guy who did "The Batman"? Yeah, that guy who did "The Crapman" did the art style for this one.

G.I. Joe? Went to the movies, the team got cut down, and the specialization went out the window in order to make it live-action. *sigh* This port got forked.

My Little Pony? Okay, I've only seen screenshots. The artwork is MUCH WORSE than the original. This isn't conventional American like the previous version pre-FCC-edict. This isn't Japanese anime ether. This is worse. It's worse than "Crapman" Transformers. It's worse than Homestar Runner. I'm actually having a hard time thinking of anything that sinks lower than this current series, and that includes kindergarden-age kids' fridge art!

And parents now are subjecting their kids to THIS?!?!?

Comments

[kesarra.livejournal.com]

Most of the old 80's cartoons were terrible commercials.

If you want something that truly looks bad but had stupendous content, look no further than Home Movies.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Home Movies I believe was animated on an RAM-expanded Atari 520ST using it's 16-color 320x200 resolution screen. It was blocky, pixelly but for the place it had in Adult Swim, it worked.

This series of MLP? You can't compare it to Adult Swim's Home Movies because it's supposed to be a kids show. It's supposed to have a certain level of cheesiness that is requires from kids cartoons.

Unfortunately, someone ordered several orders of magnitude too much cheese, and poured it right in. It's TOO cheesy. It not only shows in the artwork, it spews out of the artwork and makes a mess all over. I won't be surprised if I actually watch the show, I'll start farting a third of the way through due to my lactose intolerance, and WILL SOMEONE GET A MOP FOR F***'S SAKE??! IT'S GETTING VELVEETA ALL OVER THE LIVING ROOM FLOOR!

[kesarra.livejournal.com]

What do you really expect from Genndy Tartakovsky? He worked on Power Puff Girls and Dexters Lab.

[witchiebunny.livejournal.com]

Uh, I think you're taking this just a TAD bit too seriously. Really, it seems much more like the animators are having fun with the series, and that includes the art. So the art isn't up to the former standard or the former style, does that make it bad just because it's different?

tl;dr lighten up some and let them have fun with the series and art. After all, what's animation and a show if you can't even have fun with it?

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

"Different" doesn't mean "bad" in all cases. "Different" can be good if it produces a better result.

This produced a worse result.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

On your "short" point, why not have some fun with criticizing it? I mean, it's not every day I can turn a conversation into a grocery store where someone's dropped a few bottles of My Little Pony cheese dip.

Which reminds me. *BZZZZRRRTT!!!! CLEAN-UP ASLE 5! CLEAN-UP ASLE 5! *zrrrt!*

[witchiebunny.livejournal.com]

I still think, no offense, that you're raging where there's no reason to rage. They share the same name, but it's like apples and oranges. Tell me, do you refuse to read webcomics with good characterization and stories because the art isn't that great?

I really think focusing on the art/the superficial here isn't really beneficial to anyone.

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

Okay, so they don't look particularly like horses anymore. But the simplicity makes for more effective animation. There's a saying in typography: A good typeface is not a set of beautiful letters, it is a beautiful set of letters. Similarly, animation is not a sequence of beautiful pictures. Drawing all those contours in the old shows may have made for better-looking stills, but the way they moved suffered as a result. The motion was super-awkward. The new show is probably the first MLP show to animate a full-on gallop properly.

Anyway, the real substance of this show, and the reason for its popularity, is in the writing, characterization, and acting. I can tell the characters apart, and I can listen to the voices for extended periods of time without wanting to go deaf or commit genocide. I love ponies and I have always wanted to enjoy the shows but this is the first one I actually can.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Turning it on it's end, here. If the show is well written, the "story universe" fully fleshed out, and the acting spot on...

...then why did the animation turn for the worse in terms of style? Okay, they got movement down. Why couldn't they have refined the old version and did subtle changes so they don't inadvertently change the ponies into dragons?

Like typography, shows should have not a collection of good features, but a good collection of features. For me, this series has the former plus a few very obvious sore spots.

Or are they gashes spewing out cheese? I CALLED FOR A MOP! WHERE IS IT?!?!

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

I think you're judging the visual style as objectively, universally bad when the truth is that it is not to your tastes. I gather that you just can't stand it when things take a turn for the geometric. There's probably no point in pushing you to try it, then. No force on earth will make me like strawberries or bananas, and if I hear a chef has done something great with them, I still won't try it, but I also won't say that the chef's choice to put them on the menu was a colossal blunder before the whole culinary world. And I know there are perfectly good shows I don't intend to watch, either, and perfectly good books I don't intend to read.

Also, I want to make sure you understood my turn of phrase. The point is that making a part "better" by whatever measure sometimes does not make the whole better, even by the same measure. It's about, well, elements in harmony. The visual style goes with the writing and the setting and the humor. If you paired these up with animation that looked like the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, it would be technically impressive but the show as a whole would become garbage. If it were forced to resemble the style of 1980's Toei productions, the dissonance would be less severe but it would still be there.

[equusmaximus.livejournal.com]

Actually, the new series is far more watchable than the original. While this certainly is not true of many other remakes - the assorted Transformers bastardizations come to mind - this was well done. You can't tell me that the original designs with their massive heads and elephant-feet were any more "horse-like" than the current issue. The movement is far more accurate - particularly the body-language. I've never seen so much attention to the ear-movements in a horse-cartoon as I've seen in this new series.

The writing is far better, the characters are far more likable, and best of all, there's no "small human child who must save all of Ponydom with her latent magical abilities!"

When all I was were the stills, I was thinking "this is going to be horrible" too. But then Dingo finally convinced me to have a look, and I was hooked. Seriously, check it out for yourself, and see. :)

http://www.youtube.com/user/pensivepony#p/u

[aragontigerseye.livejournal.com]

Well, I have to admit I haven't seen the new My little Pony yet, the original never was quite my cup of tea anyways.

I take you're referring to "Transformers animated" there, tho? Ifso... well, yes, the art style did have me barf bricks at first, but, as was said for MLP too, it's a thing of looking at the whole show. TA was done by many of the people who also did G1 Transformers, including many of the voiceactors and the voice director. Thus it did have so much loving parody, so many nods to G1 it caught even the most hardcore G1 fans if you just nailed them onto a chair long enough to see a few episodes. The show just grows on you.

I think some of the reasons for the change in artstyle, for MPL as well as TA, are to make it cheaper to produce (less detail equals less drawing time equals less money needed to produce) but also making it look different enough so it's a new thing all over again.

That some producers are just art-blind just can't be helped. ;>