Review of My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) by Christy S — 06 Oct 2017

I wish this movie really were as cute and sweet as the critical reviews are complaining it is, but it does not actually succeed in that department. I took my 3 1/2-year-old to it as her first movie, and she was scared most of the way through it.

More than half the movie is spent in scenes of fighting, running away from something scary, evil plotting, or pony enslavement. Even the supposedly overly sweet parts cited by critics, like the pirate's threat of emotional scarring or Fluttershy reducing a bad guy to tears through compassionate listening, seem intended more as jokes for the adults and not contributing to the experience of the children in the audience.

A My Little Movie should be sweet. It should be a safe first movie for young children. Instead this movie seemed unnecessarily violent to me. It delivers an extremely lazy plot line--friends must work together to defeat a bad guy threat while having adventures along the way--and even lazier song lyrics.

The MLP series actually has several songs that hold up to multiple listens, but the songs throughout this movie were hard to stomach through a single listen. Disappointing! I would love to see a pony movie as good as "Rainbow Rocks" was; this is NOT it.