Of Ponies and Bronies
The Transformers may be raking in the box office gold and G.I. Joe battled COBRA in the multiplexes, but while those once-upon-the-eighties Hasbro cartoon shows made the leap from TV cartoon to big screen live action, the diminutive equines collectively known as My Little Pony have returned in a new animated series that has surprised a lot of people.
To put it simply, The Hub Channel’s My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is one hip show.
You can’t mention Pony to some people without images of the original, for-preadolescent-girls-only 1980’s series* popping into their heads (“why on Earth would you be watching that?”), but a quick look at MLP:FiM’s attractive character design and Flash animation, clever scripting and off-kilter characterizations quickly convinces them this Pony is a completely different animal.
It was a project of Faust’s own that led her to riding herd on Hasbro’s pony-filled paddock: “It was actually pretty serendipitous. I met with Hasbro Studios’ Lisa Licht to pitch one of my original concepts to her as a potential animated series, a show based on my ‘Galaxy Girls’ characters [milkywayandthegalaxygirls.com].
“I told her about my background and showed her some art and an animatic I’d already produced. At the end of my pitch she pulled a My Little Pony DVD out of nowhere – Princess Promenade, one of the more recent Pony videos from 2006 and asked me if I liked My Little Pony, which happened to be my absolutely favorite toy of my childhood. From what I understand it was completely on the fly – it had just occurred to her at that moment from seeing my Galaxy Girls material that I might be a good fit for My Little Pony. She asked me to look at some DVDs and see if I could come up with some ideas where to take a new version of the franchise.”
Faust’s My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is an amalgam of existing and new Pony characters that retains and updates elements of previous series’ continuities while adding a few of its own. The central character in FiM is Twilight Sparkle, an overly intellectual unicorn sent by Equestria’s Princess Celestia to the town of Ponyville to get her horn out of her books and make some real-world (if a realm filled with magic and talking animals can be considered a real world) friends.
Sounds a bit icky so far, but stay with me.
Twilight makes the acquaintance of a quintet of locals who become her pony posse: palomino farmgirl Applejack, high-octane Rainbow Dash, ditsy party girl Pinkie Pie, kind-to-animals Fluttershy and fashion plate Rarity.
FiM episodes all have a moral lesson, spelled out in the letter Twilight sends to Celestia at the end of each episode. Said lesson never overwhelms the storytelling, which is where the show explodes expectations – and earned it a sizeable adult (and male) following in the process.
At first glance Twilight and her friends might represent female stereotypes (archetypes? role models?), but they’re also capable of going to extremes and breaking character, turning obsessive or steam-coming-out-of-their-ears choleric at unexpected moments. Cartoon and pop-culture references abound: anvils fall on heads, Pinkie Pie pursues a fleeing pony with Pepe Le Pew-style hops, Twilight’s magical abilities earn her a spot in “Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns” (an X-Men reference a Marvel Comics fan can spot a dozen channels away), the 2001 monolith makes a cameo appearance (complete with a Zarathustra musical sting), a pack of canine villains are named (undoubtedly by a David Bowie fan) the Diamond Dogs…
They’re secret signals, hidden messages letting animation fans know the show’s creators are pop-culture geeks not unlike themselves. Faust credits the writers she’s known and worked with since her days on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, but it’s impossible to imagine a show created by someone actively involved with Fosters and Powerpuff Girls not to have a higher than average hip quotient.
Faust’s character designs embrace rather than fight Flash animation’s 2D look. The ponies are rendered in shading-free flat colors with their outlines darker tints of their body color; their manes and tails are intentionally rendered as curving surfaces completely lacking in depth. (They more resemble wood shavings curling out of a carpenter’s plane than the bouffant ‘dos sported by previous pony generations.) “[Hasbro] was worried the hair on the ponies weren’t elaborate and fancy enough,” Faust recalls. “That raises production problems: the more inner line work you have on hair and when you start animating individual hairs, unless you’re on a feature animation budget it’s just not going to turn out right. I turned them around and now we have very simple hair, but it moves beautifully.”
The pony’s heads are essentially the same size as their bodies, with enormous eyes that would put any anime girl to shame and teeny-tiny muzzles that disappear when viewed head-on. By contrast male ponies (far more numerous than in previous MLP series and possibly a contributing factor to the show’s embrace by guys) sport prominent muzzles and even elaborate facial hair.
MLP: FiM’s enthusiastic adult fans (many of whom have adopted pony personas while the males have taken to calling themselves ‘bronies’) are already the stuff of legends: websites like equestriadaily.com (14.8 million page views as of this writing and increasing at the rate of three per second!), ponychan.net and ponibooru.413chan.net are overflowing with fan art (ranging from grade school quality to astonishingly on- or beyond-model), stories (likewise ranging from simple homages to dystopic imaginings of a pony uprising against Princess Celestia), debates and discussion.
Fans have seized on crowd scene ponies, turning several into pony celebrities to the point of earning them more screen time; case in point, ‘Derpy Hooves:’ “Yeah, that was a character that came from the fans,” laughs supervising director Jayson Thiessen. “It was kind of a mistake in the background. Someone along the way drew one character with crossed eyes. It was way in the background and nobody noticed it. When we went online to see what people were saying about the show we saw characters extracted out of the background and we started to personify them.
“The Derpy character was sort of the most popular, and we liked her too. It was like, ‘wow, we weren’t even thinking about this.’ As production was going along, we thought – with Lauren’s blessing – maybe we can make that pony a little cross-eyed, make her derpy again. We’ll keep her in there like a little Easter Egg for people to catch.” (And then there’s the pony with the hourglass ‘cutie mark’ on his rump and an imagined resemblance to David Tennant the fans have dubbed ‘Dr. Whooves’…)
What’s most impressive though are the fans’ homemade videos, mash-ups of show footage expertly edited to everything from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” to dialog from The Matrix. The Hub, the new cable channel co-owned by Hasbro and Discovery and home to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic returned the favor with a mash-up of their own: an on-air promo slicing and dicing show footage to “Equestria Girls” (a take-off on Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg’s “California Gurls”) salutes the show’s unexpected audience with the shout-out lyric “our bronies hang out too (come on bronies) because they know we’re awesome fillies.”
“I don’t like that perception out there that for girls means ‘lame’ and not cool,” Faust sums up. “I thought you could make something for girls that you could make it fun, make it funny, make it entertaining, make it compelling, make it exciting. I think we succeeded so well that people watch it and recognize that and get past the fact that it’s about rainbow-colored ponies and enjoy it and embrace it – and admit that they enjoy it.”
In other words, rock on bronies!
* Full disclosure: from 1981 through ’86 I was more or less gainfully employed by Sunbow Productions, the entity that created the original Transformers, G.I. Joe and My Little Pony series.
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One thing that ALWAYS bugs me with these articles.
"Bronies" includes lady fans as well.
That's all.
Excellent article. The best about the "brony" phenomenon I've read so far.
For my part, the enjoyment I get out of MLP:FiM has to do with its utter lack of pseudo-cynicism, which is a plague that infects certain other cartoons which more aggressively aspire to attract adults as well as kids. MLP's characters have flaws, but there isn't a single cruel, mean-spirited idiot among them (I'm looking at YOU, Cosmo from the Fairly Oddparents) and it's also refreshing to see cartoon humor not based on misogyny (and I'm looking at YOU, Butch Hartman, *creator* of Fairly Oddparents). "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" is a tonic in these somber times, an antidote to bad news and pessimism and gloom. It's Candyland in a network landscape full of drivel, and it's the kind of candy that's GOOD for you. I'm so proud of Lauren Faust for taking on a project that others in her profession would perhaps scorn. She knew what she was doing.
MLP:FIM has appeal to adult males for many reasons, but one I think is inescapable: this series has an unapologetic, infectious joy to it that reaches all audiences while condescending to none. In Western society, men are allowed only emotions of competition, aggression, and dominance; anything else is mocked as weak or effeminate. Joy, however, should NOT be linked to gender; it is a human right. MLP:FIM is a show which allows men to experience the simple-but-profound emotion of joy in a world that actively tries to deny them this feeling.
It's very liberating to feel celebratory about something that doesn't involve threats of hellfire eternal or dropping cluster-bombs on people who hate us.
And emotional liberation... is magic.
Just like women who recently are gaining the positive, liberating feeling of self-determination and empowerment, when a manly man who can bite a beer can in half while wiping out a regiment of invaders with a chainsaw is allowed to feel simple joy in a show that isn't an embarrassment the reaction is going to be pretty strong.
My only fear is that there will be a temptation to change the show to accommodate this unexpected demographic. DON'T DO IT. The balance right now is working perfectly, and unnecessary tinkering can only hurt. As said in the wrapup of one of the shows, "Today I learned that if you try to please everypony, usually you end up pleasing nopony, including yourself". Stay the course, and we bronies will stay with you.
And shell out buck bucks for premium pony toys.
What's left to say? This is an outstanding look at the show and its out-of-nowhere random fandom! For myself, I've always been fascinated by the process of animation and its flexibility as a storytelling medium. That was the problem with the cartoons of the 80s (at least to my mind), they didn't tell stories, they related incidents. It's impossible to tell a story without conflict and dramatic tension. The new cartoon has that in spades, and although the animation may be 2D, the characters are fully three-dimensional. The fact that the new characters each have their own little flaws and quirks and aren't bland, saccharine caricatures makes them immeasurably more watchable. I've never been more impressed by an animator than I have been by Lauren Faust's ability to breathe new life into a tired franchise; she and her creative team deserve every ounce of praise that the fans have heaped upon the show. Of course, it never would have gained the following it did unless people were willing to step outside the envelope of traditional gender roles and give it a shot. The enthusiasm, creativity and joie-de-vivre shown by the resulting fan community is just fantastic!
And excellent article that explains what a growing legion of fans have struggled to portray to non-believers. It's amazing how quickly people will cave once you can get them to watch it, but that's the hardest part, isn't it? Other articles have attempted to portray things they've never even made an attempt at understanding, a cursory glance will show you nothing about this show. It's everything under the brightly colored skin. It's a general humor admired by all ages, and has been lacking in recent years.
Someone mentioned it's easy to make a show for adults to watch with the kids, but hard to create something good enough to WANT to watch.
I typed that all out again to make sure people read it. It's true. So thanks, from an animation/cartoon fan. People should just appreciate something good, and fun once in awhile.
I know what alarmist rubbish you're talking about and I won't mention their name either. I didn't know who they were before they attacked MLP and they'll gain no notoriety from me!
This author is dead on and can be summarized like this: The show has an enormous fan-base of all ages and sexes BECAUSE IT'S THAT GOOD. End.
Rock on Animation World Network =3
Amazing article
Great article, thank-you for taking the time to do research=]
The problem with most children's programming today is that they only try to make a show that parents can watch with their kids. It's easy to make a show that parents can watch with their kids. The hard part is making a show that parents WANT to watch with their kids. And at that, Lauren Faust has succeeded. Not since Sesame Street has children's programming courted an older demographic so successfully.
It's good to know that there are some people (like the people who wrote this) who don't just go around bashing the brony population, especially when they haven't even seen the new show. I commend you on this well written piece of literature and if I here any neigh-sayers, I will first Love and Tolerate the shit out of them and follow that up with a redirection to this article.
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