My Little Pony: The Movie

“Given that the story centers on toy pony princesses with magical abilities, My Little Pony: The Movie contains multitudes to unpack.”

Title: My Little Pony: The Movie (2017)
Director: Roland Emmerich 👨🏼🇨🇦
Writers: Meghan McCarthy 👩🏼🇺🇸, Joe Ballarini 👨🏼🇺🇸, Rita Hsiao 👩🏻🇺🇸, and Michael Vogel 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈

Reviewed by Dana 👩🏼🇺🇸♿

Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.

Technical: 3.5/5

A half dozen pastel-drenched, cute-as-buttons magical ponies dubbed the “Mane Six” feature in the Friendship is Magic universe, where My Little Pony: The Movie takes place. The story opens in a flurry of activity as they prepare for the upcoming Friendship Festival, decorating stages and making cupcakes—all as Princess Twilight Sparkle (voiced by Tara Strong) darts around trying to oversee the perfect setup. However, she’s stopped in her adorable tracks by the evil Storm King (Liev Schreiber) and his henchpony, Tempest (Emily Blunt).

The journey follows a fairly standard route for a children’s movie: The group of friends set off to seek help from a mysterious queen in order to save their home and stop the Storm King from stealing all of the ponies’ magic for himself. The world beyond Equestria is not quite as welcoming as they’re used to, but their sweetness and charm wins them unlikely allies along the way. As plots go, My Little Pony is more or less what you’d expect from a franchise targeted at little girls—and to a lesser extent, at bronies. But the message of friendship and emphasis on “everypony,” in pony parlance, feels sincere.

I’ve sat through a number of kids’ movies, between my godson and the kids I babysat as a teenager and have come to appreciate those that realize how many adults are probably in the audience. Little winks and nods that fly over tiny heads can sometimes play as crass or forced, but My Little Pony scatters them through like sparkly fun. As a full-grown adult whose preferred movie fare splits evenly between dry comedies and soul-crushing documentaries, the highest praise I can give My Little Pony: The Movie is that, yeah—I’d probably watch the sequel.

Gender: 4.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Ahead of the Friendship Festival’s main event, a performance by Songbird Serenade (Sia), Princess Twilight Sparkle scribbles equations aimed at optimizing the sound and lighting for the stage. Something of a genius, Twilight Sparkle’s intelligence forms an integral part of her character and her knack for strategy and problem-solving comes up again and again throughout the story. For a flying cartoon unicorn capable of creating force fields, the addition of some STEM magic offers young viewers a quality they can both envy—and eventually achieve, if they so choose.

Within the children’s movie genre, stories featuring both female leads and female friendships continue to serve more as the exception than the rule, so I give credit to My Little Pony for reinforcing the idea that girls (well, girl ponies) can save the day just fine without a prince or a knight by their side. When the pony pals embark on their quest for help, they aren’t seeking a great warrior or an army, but a queen with a secret. The band of flying pirates they encounter don’t serve a dread pirate with a beard or a low growl, but a cunning parrot (Zoe Saldana) who cares for her crew. Characters with female voices and identities serve as the heroes of their own story, while exhibiting “feminine” traits like empathy and generosity not typically valued as qualities that win in a fight.

The movie’s one major downfall where gender is concerned lies in the heavy reliance on stereotypes. The ponies, unicorns, pegasus, and other magic horses who populate Equestria identify almost exclusively as female. The only male-identifying main character is Spike (Cathy Weseluck), a diminutive dragon. The color scheme, made up of bright pinks, soft purples, and baby blues, reinforces outdated notions of which hues are for girls and which are for boys; the primary male ally to the ponies, Capper (Taye Diggs), sports burnt orange fur and a red jacket that stand in stark contrast. To represent gender equitably, filmmakers need to move past the gender binaries that continue to divide us into factions of pink vs. blue, unicorns vs. dragons—and just as we tell girls that they can be anything they want, we need to let boys know that they, too, can love pink unicorns.

Race: 3.75/5

With an animated movie about anthropomorphized ponies, inclusion often involves coding—reading subtext into character attributes. Signifiers take the form of dialect, hairstyles, attire, or the use of key phrases. Throughout the pony realm, manes and tales appear soft and silky smooth, and if not for a deliberate exception, it wouldn’t be an issue. But when Songbird Serenade arrives in Equestria, she does so flanked by two security ponies, one of whom sports hair that, even on a pony, cannot be seen as anything but “Black.”

Songbird Serenade's Bodyguard in foreground

Few or no ponies even have black hair, making the black curls, bumpy tail, and goatee stand out even more. This, of course, begs the question—why is he the only pony with natural Black hair? None of the adorable unicorns or undersea hippogriffs, even Uzo Aduba’s Queen Novo, sport braids or tight curls. In Equestria, the only pony hair seems to be silky smooth. Racialized beauty standards persist in almost every façet of modern culture, so much so that states have begun enacting legislation specifically aimed at banning hair discrimination. Matthew A. Cherry even wrote a book and produced a 2020 short film called Hair Love, “born out of seeing a lack of representation in mainstream animated projects, and also wanting to promote hair love amongst young men and women of color.”

Behind the scenes, at least, My Little Pony makes deliberate choices to expand the all-white voice cast tied to the series. The movie features Black vocal talents including Taye Diggs, Nigerian American Uzo Aduba, and Afro-Latina Zoe Saldana. Diggs’ Capper, a cat character, speaks in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) throughout and carefully avoids code-switching pitfalls that could implicitly tie “Black” speech to bad acts.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.25

The queer-coded Rainbow Dash (Ashley Ball) sports a rainbow mane, an obvious references to the LGBTQ pride flag. Her mane is also cut into a shorter “butch” style and she speaks in a slightly lower register than the high-pitched “girlie” voices of the other ponies. The series on which the movie is based has evidently leaned into affirming Rainbow Dash’s queerness and hinted heavily at a relationship between her and Applejack (also voiced by Ashley Ball), and gone so far as to introduce two explicitly lesbian couples among the minor characters.

The value of LGBTQ representation in children’s shows, even cartoon shows, shouldn’t be underappreciated. When the long-running Arthur revealed that Arthur’s teacher of two decades, Mr. Ratburn, was getting married to another male character, the news went viral—especially among Millennials. The same generation that grew up playing with the toy ponies that My Little Pony is based on also grew up with Mr. Ratburn, but we had little to no exposure to characters who normalized queerness in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

For Millennials who grew up in this era, cartoons reinforced a paradigm of what constituted “normal” and the sense of trauma at being labeled otherwise—and the internal struggle to recognize one’s own identity—didn’t end when we outgrew shows like Arthur and My Little Pony. Now as these series increasingly recognize a broader spectrum of identity, it not only sets up today’s children to feel more seen and accepted, but it serves as something of a balm to generations who didn’t have that same sense of inclusion growing up.

Bonus for Disability: +0.25

Though the overarching moral theme of My Little Pony is the value of friendship, its writers and animators take strides to layer in messages about self-worth and normalize differences. Tempest, the henchpony to the Big Bad, has a broken horn that sparks with electricity throughout the story. She eventually explains that after the accident that caused her injury, and her subsequent struggle to use magic as her pony friends did, she turned away from society and towards evil. This common backstory joins the trend of narratives that associate disability and injury with evil, seen through characters like Captain Hook in every iteration of Peter Pan and Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise. But My Little Pony, to its credit, shows Tempest eventually recognizing that true friendship is more valuable than power. Upon the Storm King’s betrayal, she sides with the pony pals who welcome her into the fold. The message finally salvaged when, rather than restore her horn, Twilight Sparkle affirms her difference and notes that her horn is powerful as it is—a sentiment that Tempest celebrates by using it to launch a fireworks show.

A band of bird pirates who aid the ponies also feature a number of classic pirate disabilities, from a peg leg to a hook claw, and the awesome avian crew do as pirates often do—sing, dance, and kick backsides. A googly-eyed, gibberish-spouting crewmember veers a bit close to any number of negative disability tropes, but manages to be more than just a hapless ally in the ultimate battle. All in all, My Little Pony does rely on negative tropes about disability, but offers subversive twists that at least neutralize the harm.

Deduction for Religion: -0.50

Where the movie manages to put a slightly positive spin on disability tropes, it leans hard into one of the worst possible stereotypes for the villain’s story: a twist on the blood libel myth. The very, very abridged version goes that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for any range of evil-doing.

The ultimate plot that the Storm King lays in order to gain power uses some of the common themes of the anti-Semitic myth, in which the greedy bad guy drains something vital—in this case, magic—from innocents, as it literally seeps from the ponies like blood. On its own, this might be less insidious. But upon gaining his new powers, the King amuses himself by testing his ability to raise and lower the sun, at one point explicitly quoting one of the songs most closely associated with Jews—“Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof.

And thus, the image is complete: A greedy Jew steals the powers of pure and innocent children (or at least, child-like ponies). Lest we forget, he also sports cloven hooves and horns, symbols associated with the devil and supposedly-sinister Jews.

Bizarrely, My Little Pony doesn’t hold a monopoly on movies about beloved childhood characters employing a variation on the blood libel myth. Both Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1990) and direct-to-video Barbie: Swan Lake (2003) have been accused of much the same, similarly employing the idea of magic stolen by a Jewish-coded character. Repeating the elements of a myth that has incited so much hatred helps such virulent rumors persist to this day, most notably as the driving myth behind the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Mediaversity Grade: B 4.00/5

Given that the story centers on toy pony princesses with magical abilities, My Little Pony: The Movie contains multitudes to unpack. Children’s films require more scrutiny than they have historically been given; of the values and beliefs we form during childhood, a good deal of it comes through external influences like media. When children see their favorite characters winning the day, the qualities they share with the heroes imbue a sense of self-worth. On the other hand, messages to the opposite—whether by exclusion or direct call-out—have lasting and sometimes traumatic effects.

The plastic ponies from my childhood probably did not impact my self-worth much, but back then, their voices and stories were my own. For kids growing up with walking, talking, adventuring versions, it matters that a pony protagonist can do complex math or has hair that looks just a little bit like theirs.

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Grade: BLiOctober 6, 2017