TV Series Review: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Yes yes, after seeing a lot of my friends on facebook say that this was actually a pretty cute show and I had already seen other people say it was really well written for a kid's show for a toy line. Besides, I really needed something cute to balance out everything I've been watching (Deadman Wonderland and Torchwood: Children of Earth in the same day? Sure, why not!) and this is an adorable show.


My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Summary: Twilight Sparkle is the student of Princess Celestia, ruler of Equestria, and a rather reclusive little unicorn who would rather read a book than actually go out and make friends. But for the sake of the world she needs to go out, make friends, and learn that you have to rely on other people at least some of the time.

The Good: The show really is well-written for a kids show and, as silly as it can be, it always feels like an intelligent kind of silly, not one where everything is dumbed down for the audience. The main cast is well-rounded and the show shows that it's okay to be a girly-girl, a tomboyish girl or anything in between (which sounds a lot like the cheesy "you can be anyone you want to be" statement but the show let's the characters show this so it doesn't come off as forced at all). Each pony had a lot of screen time, none of them are in every episode but none of them are absent from more than a couple of episodes at the time, and the show also develops a some of the side cast and has a lot of reoccurring background characters. It's a character based show with fun and relatable characters that I probably would have liked as a little kid.  
 

The Bad: It seems a bit odd that the first two episodes are a big, grand adventure about saving the world and the rest of the show is about more mundane, everyday problems (such as being jealous or keeping secrets). It's all done well but it is a bit of a mood-whiplash, it would be nice to see the cast have one or two more adventures like the opening episodes.

The Art: As probably a good portion of the internet already knows, this show was flash animated (as opposed to traditional animation), I personally can't really see a difference in the animation but then again I normally can't. The character designs are simple and very cute with all the bright colors and clean lines without any noticeable quality slips. The backgrounds also look good and the "special effects" are fine as well, it's a good looking show as well as a well-written one. 


 The Music: There was an awful lot of singing in this show, surprisingly enough, and a number of the songs are really catchy (Rarity's song about sewing almost feels like it would fit on Project Runway). Funny enough, while a lot of the ponies have the same voice actresses a lot of them also have different voice actresses for the singing bits. Seems odd that they would go to the trouble for casting two people for a lot of parts but the singing voices are pretty good matches for the regular ones.

So yes, I really did like this show (it's not like I have time to watch anything "ironically") and I can't wait for the second season. I do wish that it was streaming somewhere legally (or at the very least not showing just on a cable channel I don't get)  and hope that it is on hulu by the time the second season rolls around.