My Little Pony: Pony Life

While I loved MLP: FIM (since the older MLP was one of those shows I used to loved as a lil girl and felt FIM was a good show I could use to bond with my then toddler son circa 2014), this spin off is so stupid. It reminds me to freaking TTG. FIM was one of the best episodic western cartoons I've seen in a very long time. However, this spin off is just horrible. Those aren't my brave mare six, just some mockery of them.

People have, ever since the inception of the franchise, debated over whether or not the first few My Little Pony-iterations were actually good. However, it doesn't seem to matter if you were a fan from the beginning or if you found yourself in the 'brony'-end of the spectrum; everyone seemed to agree that My Little Pony Tales (AKA Gen 3.5) was absolute garbage.

Now we have a new 'in-betweener' show, and it seems to go in a similar direction (AKA, it's not very good). After finishing the long-running critical success that was My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, it only makes sense that Hasbro wants to keep the brand alive while waiting for Gen 5 to come out. However, setting it in the same universe as Gen 4 was probably not the best creative decision on Hasbro's part, because those horseshoes proved too big to fill.

Personally, I became a fan of Gen 4 around the second season, and while I didn't expect to get sucked in, there was a certain something about the production that spoke to me. Granted, I lost interest around season 6, and that was mostly because the show was slowly replacing charming character-driven stories with talks about diplomacy, warfare, bland backstories, and other tired storytelling tropes that only people without imaginations would care about.

However, as much as the later seasons sucked, at least the good parts were really good; the slow pace allowed the characters a lot of room to breathe and grow, the animation was very fluid and expressive, the colors were muted yet felt earthy and vibrant in tone, and the whole framing device of learning about friendship and all its nuances was a genius way to move the plot and characters forward. The first few seasons even poked fun of itself a lot by showing how a horse-centric society would look like, all while telling amusing horse-puns.

Pony Life is a whole different beast altogether. Running at half the running time of a normal Gen 4 episode, this show strips the whole character interaction and growth bit from the equation and turns it into strictly a comedy show. That in itself is not a bad move, and there are enough differences in mood and behavior to distinguish this from the better show. For what it is worth, the show is very bouncy, it is animated alright and it is intermittently chuckle-worthy for a younger audience.

However, in terms of the technical aspects, the show feels very sloppy. The muted earthy color schemes and depth of field have both been replaced with more stark colors and flat shapes. Everything's framed on the same level, making the world feel flat and poorly composited. These would probably be very minor offenses had the show been its own thing, but it is a continuation of a show that did all these things a whole lot better; it is not living up to its superior predecessor.

All in all, it is just kind of meh. It isn't awful, but it isn't very good either. It will probably be fun for your kids, but a bit exhausting for anyone else who watches it for too long.

I would be much more harsh, but honestly, its hard to get mad at, its terrible, but harmless. Its best to ignore it and not see it as canon.

My daughters love FIM and the movies. When I saw this, I showed them and the look on my 7 year old's face said it all. The new animated style is terrible. My girls would love for the series to return as it was before, but their interest in this is lacking. Too bad, looks like another show will have to reap the marketing rewards for this one.

First, let's clarify something here, this show isn't about ponies anymore; they were thrown out of the window in the first few minutes. The characters look and behave more like cats... weird pig-nosed cats, but I digress.

Pony Life is a vacuous and fairly pointless show but then I suppose it is distracting enough and it is worth a look if you want to be overwhelmed with nonsense for half an hour and have no demands for anything that could be considered "good" in the traditional sense of the term.

And to be honest, it's not the most awful show ever made but it's still an incoherent hyperactive mess slapped together without any coherent message, purpose, character development, story or context whatsoever... with the added "benefit" of having potentially harmful affects on its younger viewers.

For example, there wasn't even an explanation as where those potions come from and why the "ponies" are so eagerly chugging them for no apparent reason. It seems that when they get bored, they drink potions that in turn, do something random. The problem is, so far the effects are always completely irrelevant to the plot.

Speaking of chugging potions when bored. These "ponies" don't' seem to know or even care about what they are drinking. It's hard to not see some sort of uncomfortable parallel between this and alcohol/drug abuse and parents trying to teach young children to *not* drink unknown chemicals that can be found under a kitchen sink.

In summary, Pony Life is at best, mediocre. There are much better shows out there that are actually worth watching and where the writers and animators actually put efforts into them.