My Little Pony: The Movie (1986)

I realize that the age demographic for My Little Pony: The Movie is far below my current age, predominantly aiming at kids below perhaps ten years old, but when you’re a dad with a six-year-old daughter, and one who is a huge fan of the new version of the characters in “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”, you end up watching your share of films that are not only for kids, but more specifically for young girls.  Along these lines, while realizing that this is not a film I would have ever sought out on my own, the biggest surprise about this near 90-minute commercial to sell dolls to girls like my daughter is that it’s surprisingly watchable for adults to follow and enjoy. Cloris Leachman (History of the World Part I, High Anxiety) voices Hydia, the evil witch that lives with her two bumbling daughters, Reeka (Perlman, “Cheers”) and Draggle (Kahn, Young Frankenstein), in the Volcano of Gloom that overlooks the idyllic Dream Castle, in Dream Valley, where the magical, pastel-colored Little Ponies and other interesting creatures reside.  Disgruntled Hydia hates the happy ponies, so she concocts a scheme to get rid of them for good by flooding their home and surrounding areas with a strange and nearly indestructible purple slime called the Smooze, which will pave over everything beautiful in the area forever with an impervious shell.  To escape their plight, the ponies find themselves having to ally with some new friends like the Grundles, who once also suffered the same fate of displacement from the Smooze, in order to return to their normally carefree lives yet again. Following the lead of two TV specials that aired in the preceding year that establish the Ponies and their peculiar world, this full-length feature peppers the very basic plot with lots of interesting bells and whistles, the most prominent among them being several musical numbers of different varieties.  It references quite a few old Disney fairy tales in its animation and style, though not in any serious vein, and is in keeping with the just-a-tad-better-than-TV quality that was no doubt green-lit sue to the box office success of The Care Bears Movie released just the year before. The vocal talent is good, albeit a bit on the shrill side, which I suppose kids don’t mind as much as adults.  Cloris Leachman gives her all as Hydia, and works well in contrast with Perlman and Kahn in their roles as the evil but still surprisingly likeable witches.  Perlman’s husband, Danny DeVito (Wise Guys), gets top billing for being the most recognizable actor of the bunch at the time, and he does very well, but his role as the sweet-natured king of the brutish looking-but-inherently kind Grundles is relatively small. Tony Randall (The King of Comedy) delivers a terrific number in his sole scene as the kooky wizard named Moochick. Produced by Japan’s Sunbow Entertainment and the offshoot of the American comics company, Marvel Productions (along with South Korea’s AKOM Studios) the film joins their other release of 1986 in The Transformers: The Movie as theatrically released attempts that failed to get their fan base to go out to the movies to catch, as My Little Pony raked in less than $6 million overall, never rising above 10th place in any week of release.  Alas, unlike Transformers, the cult audience for this effort is substantially small comparatively, despite being a charming little film that many would no doubt appreciate (my daughter was very much into it). Film critics of the time were far less than kind, dismissing the film as having few redeeming qualities and just a means to advertise their products to kids, and with the failures of the two theatrical attempts to produce animated features based on their most popular toys, Sunbow and Marvel decided to push out the other two films they were working on, Inhumanoids: The Movie and GI Joe: The Movie, as straight-to-video releases, and canceled any other ideas, including beginning work on their Jem and the Holograms. While contemporary critics may have had their knives out, I believe that there’s more merit to the film than just a cash grab, as there is an earnest attempt to make a quality musical, with standouts including Baby Lickety-Split’s ’70s-tinged jazzy number, “I’ll Go It Alone”, and the Moochick’s “Home”, where Tony Randall croons about all of the different lavish or interesting places the Ponies can live with Dream Castle destroyed. While many find the current version of the Ponies to be better produced and conceived, which confusingly produced a theatrically released feature of its own in 2017 also entitled My Little Pony – The Movie, there’s still some good enjoyment here to be had for those who remember the series from the 1980s, and for those who like old-style 2D animated features. I can attest, watching this with my daughter, that kids will probably like it, not too scary for the youngest of them, and there’s enough enjoyment to be had for parents without much knowledge of these characters to reasonably enjoy the film as a colorfully comical oddity with good vocal talent and several catchy songs, despite its rudimentary plotline.  The bells and whistles make it stand out just enough to have personality and a few unique moments to entertain beyond its conceptual simplicity in world-building. — The storyline would continue into the “My Little Pony ‘n Friends” segments of the TV series, especially the first ten ten-minutes episodes entitled, “The End of Flutter Valley”, which is sometimes packaged together as a sequel. Qwipster’s rating: B- MPAA Rated: G, suitable for all audiences Running Time: 86 min.
Cast (voices): Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn, Rhea Perlman, Danny DeVito, Tony Randall, Charlie Adler, Nancy Cartwright, Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, Susan Blu
Director: Mike Joens Screenplay: George Arthur Bloom