Rainbow Rocks

The Non-Pony Pony Movie, Redux

Hasbro Studio’s Equestria Girls seems to be a somewhat… divisive animated film (well, at least amongst its periphery demographic), mostly because even though it’s based on a TV show about cartoon horsies, everyone in it has five fingers and looks like they came straight out of Doug Funnie’s home town. The main point of derision is that it’s a pony movie without ponies, and while corporate just got around to rectifying this issue, the stigma still stands, especially with this being the second non-pony pony movie in as many years.

That being said, you won’t find any animosity toward High School Land here; I got my start on the franchise with Equestria Girls, and I’ve been all kinds of stoked since Rainbow Rocks got announced as the sequel. Well, it’s arrived on Blu-Ray, and what with this being my 42nd showing of the film, I figured that I might as well review it.

Quick note: Watching the first film is really non-optional here, and the sequel doesn’t really waste any time to catch you up, barring a quick mini-recap in the title sequence. Equestria Girls is like an hour long, and between Netflix, $3-5 online options (iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, etc.), Blu-Ray, or even just googlin’ for “Yay Ponies”, you can probably find a copy pretty trivially. I’d recommend the Blu-Ray because, well, I like quality.

My Little Premise

Sooo quick recap anyway: After the coolest looking pony ever tries (and fails, quite miserably) to gain all-consuming power from Purple Smart‘s magical element of universal TV remotes, the newly appointed princess hands our antagonist an ultimatum: learn to make friends, or die alone (no, seriously). Given the franchise’s subtitle, you can probably guess the route she went with.

At the same time (like, the exact same time), three girls with magical singing instigator powers lament the lack of real magic in the world that came with their new disposable thumbs. Upon seeing the rainbow hax0r spam that ended the last film, however, they decide to enact a plan to conquer the horse riding-themed school with music.

Oh yeah, and (minor spoiler of around the 7 minute mark ‘n 3rd sneak peak) apparently the entirety of the main cast goes all equine when they play a set.

Friendship is Magic, but Singing is Evil

Equestria Girls had its fair share of issues. It was clear that DHX wasn’t really capable of animating bipeds with the same level of experience they had on multicolored midget mares, and they burned through like half the story on effectively rebuilding a world and relationships that the fanbase already had nearly three years of familiarity with.

But where it shined was the music. Everything from “the cafeteria song” to the opening theme remix (which, 91 episodes in, I’ve probably heard more than the actual theme, which I have an instinctual habit of skipping each time) is catchy and all but physically addictive to listen to. Daniel Ingram has accounted for more iTunes purchases on my part than I’m comfortable with disclosing.

Well, for the Non-Pony Pony Sequel, corporate decided to flat-out double down on this concept. The entire film, beginning to end, is less musically focused and more musically ingrained. In the first film, Rebecca Shoichet, the voice you hear every time Twilight starts singing, played Sunset Shimmer, the lead villain. Seemingly in the desire to make this a running theme, Kazumi Evans, who you’ve probably heard singing as Rarara ‘n Best Princess, enters the villain fold as Adagio Dazzle, the cornerstone of the Terrible Trio our moxy bunch of technicolor bipeds has to out-music inside of three acts.

She might wanna look into a career in logistics, because Kazumi straight-up delivers as the ambitious and frustrated Dazzle, and her experience as a songstress lends a convincing amount of vocal range and Depth to Adagio’s voice that perfectly complements DHX’s gorgeous visual presentation (more on that later). If Shimmer was just really mean, Dazzle is manipulative, condescending, and unapologetically ruthless.

The Dazzlings are rounded out by Maryke Hendrickse, who does the lovably dumb Sonata Dusk, and Diana Kaarina handling the reins of the mean and ever-so-slightly starscream-ish Aria Blaze. They do a great job with the bumbling henchgirls motif. I wouldn’t mind seeing Maryke arrive in the film’s source material next season, and I’d really love to see Diana land outside of the Barbiesphere as far as her voiceagraphy is concerned.

Complimenting the voice work comes some much-appreciated improvements to DHX’s production pipeline, including some fantastic lighting effects and, a first for this spin-off, actual pelvic bones. While the brunt of the cast is still saddled with skirts that obfuscate some rather indeterminate physiology, it’s now clearly a stylistic choice rather than a budgetary one, and their advancements arrive in full force for nearly all of the villain troupe’s dance numbers.

It makes them convincingly seductive (especially given their mythological origins) without making them inappropriately so (I mean, it is a kid’s film).

“The Real Heroine”, or, “Ironic First Name”

Leading us back into this site’s topical basis (e.g. an addiction to valiant female protagonists) is Sunset Shimmer, Rainbow Rocks‘s redemption arc vehicle. What seemed like a simple apology at the tail end of the last film turns into a character that really, truly, wants to become a good person. Unfortunately, while she got the “good person” part downpact 30 seconds in past the intro song, she’s got about 3 years’ worth of animosity from being “measurably less than a good person” to work through. Even Purple doesn’t trust the very girl she fixed at first glance, but comes to accept over the course of the narrative that she’s really trying.

It’s this that ascends the film from a nice musical to a great animated film. The Equestria Girls franchise is an adaptation of a show about friendship, and the problem with its source material’s episodic format is that, due to the need to teach the prime demographic a lesson about this theme, the characters usually aren’t actually very good friends… until about the 25 minute mark, shortly before the “Dear Princess Celestia” narration capper kicks in and the credits roll. That issue makes its way into the prime point of contention in both of the films, and they’d make for crummy remakes of one another if not for Shimmer.

Shimmer isn’t here to learn about being a good friend. What she is here to do, from the moment she steps into the gymnasium at the outset, to the climactic turning point in the film, is to learn how to understand friendship as a concept. As someone who spent her life as a deliberate outsider to closely-knit social circles, she has to learn how her friends’ existing (and normally very strong) bonds between one another can falter (a goal that the film’s villains are effectively designed, at the very core of their being, to work toward), and help rebuild those bonds. It’s effectively a journey to ascend from simply being nice to people to becoming an inspiration for others. To this end, the Dazzlings provide a nearly perfect contrast to Shimmer’s journey.

And the music brings us to the top

One interesting point about Equestria Girls: there’s a few songs spattered throughout the film, and they’re all vocal pop pieces. As anyone who’s seen a Disney film in the last decade (or twelve) however, what you might have also noticed is that none of them are “suspension of disbelief”-breaking. That is to say, at no point do characters break out of normal conversation and into song with no discernible rhyme or reason. All but one of the songs throughout the film are brought in as soundtrack pieces (that is to say, nobody on-screen is singing them), and the one musical dance number from within the film’s story itself was clearly planned and rehearsed the day before as a part o the narrative. It’s a level of musical realism you really don’t get in animated films with this many plot-focused vocal tracks.

Rainbow Rocks basically turns that concept up to 11. Barring the opening and credit sequences, every song in the film is story-driven and in-world. The main point of conflict in the film is a “Battle of the Bands” that the school’s administration and student body have been hypnotized into participating in, and due to the villain’s magical capabilities, that event is set into motion via song. Following that, every song in the film, even ones that are used as montages, are sung as part of that competition.

If you enjoyed all of the last film’s songs that featured our main six heroines, and if you can let yourself be temporarily dazzled by the dulcet tones of their new antagonists, you’ll have yourself a good time with Rainbow Rocks.

And then all the other stuff

I’d go into more, but for everything I omitted here, you’ll know whether your want to be a part of if you enjoyed the first movie. There’s a metric ton of references to the show, the cameos are all awesome (I made double-sure not to spoil one up there), and you’re all but guaranteed to let out your geekiest “Squee!!!” during the post-credits sequence. Which, by, the way, is probably worth the price of admission in and of itself if you already saw the Discovery Family airing.

If this review sounds more like a love letter to the film than a critical analysis, that’s probably about on-point with how I feel about it. I loved every minute of this film, I’ll probably spend the day this review goes up eyeing my porch window for the postal worker to drop off my boxed copy, and while I’m not at all adverse to writing way too many words for a 72-minute children’s movie, I humbly admit that I will never have the amazing, show-stopping ability of the Great and Powerful TRIXIE!