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

[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.