I’ve just seen an email about the annual round up for British Science Fiction Association’s Vector magazine. I was sent it because last year, I wrote two reviews: one on the film Okja (warning- swearing in the trailer) and one on My Little Pony: The Movie.
This is my piece. I hope you enjoy it!
My Little Pony: The Movie
2017, Dir: Jayson Thiesson
All is well in the female-centric ponytopia of Equestria, and Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rarity and Rainbow Dash are helping their friend, Princess Twilight Sparkle, prepare for the Friendship Festival, featuring pop star pegasus Songbird Serenade (played by Sia). However, the festival is interrupted by the arrival of ferocious minions of the Storm King, led by a unicorn with a broken horn, Tempest (Emily Blunt). Tempest captures Twilight Sparkle’s sisters, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, inside obsidian spheres, but before she is petrified, Celestia calls out that her sisters should get help from the “Queen of the Hippo…”. Twilight Sparkle, her friends and her assistant, the dragon Spike, head off on a quest to save her sisters, unaware that the Storm King has charged Tempest with the capture of Twilight Sparkle to complete the spell to activate his staff; in return he will mend her broken horn. On the way the Mane 6 encounter a con artist called Capper, who intended to sell them to pay off a debt until their friendship convinces him to help them, some bird-like former pirates turned delivery airship crew and they discover that the hippos they are looking for are in fact hippogriffs, Queen Novo and Princess Skystar.
This film, aimed at small girls, is no Moana or Despicable Me. Some of the songs are catchy (Rainbow Dash’s It’s Time To Be Awesome is particularly tenacious as an ear worm) but Sia’s Rainbow is rather lacklustre as a finale to an epic quest, facing peril and testing honesty and friendships. So why include it in a round-up of SFF films of 2017? Well, when women’s roles in genre films are still too often Smurfette (Wonder Woman) or Princess Peach, a reward for the hero’s successful quest and persistence (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) it is positive to see a fantasy film where friendships between female characters are prioritised; where they rescue themselves and are resourceful and independent, solving their own problems. I have not yet seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but I have read that the core friendships and relationships are between women; however it is Rose and Finn (a man and a woman) who go off on the quest.
Katha Pollit first used the term “The Smurfette Principle” in a 1991 essay for the New York Times Magazine, in which she cited April O’ Neill from the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles cartoon as well as Miss Piggy from The Muppets- and indeed, we could include Paw Patrol with its one female puppy; the pink one, of course, as a contemporary Smurfette. By having a mainly female cast of protagonists- and a female antagonist- My Little Pony: The Movie centres female friendships in a SFF film in a way that I have not seen since Ghostbusters (2016).
I told my resident 8-year-old Brony that I was writing about My Little Pony: The Movie. He said “it’s great!” And yes, it is.
Review: Ali Baker
Nerds in Space! 