...at how decent this movie was. I did love it as a kid, but I hadn't seen the movie, its sequel or the TV series since was I was like 9. Now after My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which is one of the better animated shows I've seen in a while, I grew interested in re-visiting them, actually expecting them to not be anywhere near as good as I remembered, starting with this movie. It is not perfect, the film does have some suspenseful and touching moments but there are times where the slapsticky humour fell flat. By all means there were times when it was amusing, but others where it wasn't. The characters are likable enough and cute, with my favourite being adorable Spike with genuinely sinister Smooze not far behind, but none of them really have exactly interesting personalities and that's including Hydia, who is more a comical villain than a scary one. In regard to this point, without making it overly so I think to contrast with her daughters, who were really the comical characters, Hydia could have been more threatening. And I have to admit I didn't care for the songs very much, with exception of the title song and Smooze's song. The melodies were forgettable mostly, the lyrics coming across as overly cutesy and some(not all, Megan's was lovely) suffered from bad vocals consisting of forced tone and not much of a sense of pitch. Lickity Split's "I want"(type of song that is) song was especially true of all those things. On the other hand, I did like the animation, with the backgrounds beautiful and the colours bright and breezy. The incidental music score is wonderful and full of appealing whimsy, and the story is cute and easy to follow with suspenseful moments and good messaging. The voice cast are absolutely great, Danny DeVito is good although his appearance is somewhat brief and Rhea Perlman and especially Madeline Kahn are a lot of fun and are an amusing double act, but for me the best was Cloris Leachman. Although the character of Hydia is not quite up to Leachman's calibre, she really sounds as though as though she was having a ball providing the voice. Overall, a decent if imperfect movie. 7/10 Bethany Cox
Review of My Little Pony: The Movie
