The Hasbroisation of cinema continues apace, although after the relentless din of five Transformers and a Battleship, it’s almost a relief to be confronted with something of a more bucolic stripe.
Scholars of the MLP canon should be advised that this full-length animation abandons the comparatively hip Equestria Girls strand of 2015’s Friendship Games – wherein the ponies were magicked into smart-talking college students – in favour of a return to the cloud cuckoo land from where the franchise comes. Thus we find earnest purple nag Twilight Sparkle’s efforts to stage the annual Friendship festival sabotaged by underbrushed outsider Tempest Shadow – the latter voiced by Emily Blunt, who must have really loved these toys as a child to have wound up in this vicinity.
It’s not unpretty to look at, with dabs of daffy humour (the festival’s “mane event” is Sia, or a four-legged version thereof: a Sia-horse, perhaps) and Disney-aping inspirational songs that prove broadly less annoying than Let It Go. Still, there will have been cumulonimbi possessed of greater substance.
That it’s been brainstormed in a boardroom can be observed from the mid-film diversion into non-ponyish (but demographically desirable) pirate territory, and even its minipop feminism seems geared towards creating a fleeting uptick on some minion’s spreadsheet: a high-pitched whinny of “You’re awesome, girls, now buy the product.”
