My Little Pony: Pony Life

I can't believe it. I can't freakin' believe it! Almost immediately after the sweet and bitter goodbye to FiM, Hasbro followed it up... with THIS?! Are you... are you serious, Hasbro? This is how you honor the end of MLP's most successful and iconic era? THIS?! You're literally spitting and taking a dump on the very thing that resurrected this franchise, broke the "it's just a show for little girls" stereotype AND made you a gigantic fortune. This is insulting!

First off, the animation is cheap. It's literally a rehash of the same bland, boring CalArts visual style that i'm sick and tired of seeing! Hell, they don't even do anything new or remotely good with it. They just shrunk the characters down to chibi-style without any changes, and gave it some of the laziest backgrounds i've seen in a cartoon in a long time. Seriously, these backgrounds look like they were drawn by a 4-year-old in the span of 10 minutes. Remember the beautiful visuals and backgrounds FiM had? well, Hasbro literally said "Screw all that!" and gave us something that's so flat and lifeless to look at.

Then comes the characters.... oh boy! Remember how i said FiM went against the cutesy, lovey-dovey stereotypes most girl shows before it suffered from, and actually made it enjoyable for all ages? That was completely thrown out the window here! Instead, what we got here are grotesque caricatures of the original Mane 6 we all know and love. And they're not even likable or interesting in this show! These clones literally have only one single trait to them: Twilight is the psychotic nerd, Pinkie is annoying, Rarity is the hoarder, Rainbow Dash is overly competitive, Applejack just breaks the fourth wall for no real reason, and Fluttershy.... oh my god, Hasbro! What the hell did you do to her?! as for the others, they're no better either. They even got rid of Luna and Cadence, and Twilight doesn't have her princess status anymore. What were you thinking, Hasbro?

As for the comedy.... again, going back to FiM: the original show had jokes that actually landed and were legitimately funny. It didn't focus on the juvenile aspect to insult the audience's intelligence, because the writers knew what they were doing, and went outta their way to make it legit funny. It even found ways to make slapstick funny, which is pretty rare in cartoons nowadays. And it also had heart to it. It made sure the audience cared about the characters and what they went through. What does Pony Life do? COMPLETELY THROW THAT IN THE TRASH! Like it meant nothing! Now, we're stuck with what Hasbro THINKS is "comedy", but in reality, it's the Teen Titans Go-kinda humor: all the jokes are surface level, the slapstick is way too overused, it focuses way too much on modern technology (something that SHOULDN'T EVEN EXIST IN THIS WORLD!), and worst of all: it's never funny! the best this show has in terms of humor are the occasional small chuckles, but even those are few and far in between. But then again, the pacing in this damn thing is so break-neck fast, it's almost impossible to catch a good joke (if there even is any).

And all this brings me to Pony Life's biggest sin. The one thing that pulled me outta it entirely. After watching a few episodes, this is the thing that - at one point - made me go: "Ya know what? I'm done. I'm done with this show". It has no soul, heart or even a reason to exist. The basic things that made FiM so entertaining and so worthwhile, they got rid of them here! It's all a corporate downgrade to what was once a great show. The charm and heart of FiM is completely gone. We're left with a soulless clone that offers us little-to-nothing to enjoy until G5 eventually comes around, and that's NOT something to be proud of. That's NOT how we should honor G4 and everything it brought us, and how it literally started one of the best decades in animation. You can erase Pony Life entirely from the MLP lore, and nothing would change. I'm telling you, it would all stay exactly the same. That's how pointless Pony Life is. It only exists because Hasbro wanted to make more toys and more money.

What a turd! Despite a few bright spots in some episodes here and there, this is nothing more but a shameless downgrade to what was the best era of My Little Pony. It might not be as bad as Teen Titans Go or G3.5, but it's pretty close. Like i said, i'm officially done with this show. I seriously waited for it to hopefully get good at some point, but with how it's turning out.... probably best to abandon ship and wait for G5 and the next pony movie. Just skip this thing and stick with FiM. I promise, you're not missing anything worth your time here.

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.

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.

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.

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.