REVIEW: Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony
An Opaque, Alien Artifact
This documentary is a cultural oddity. In an anthropological sense, it is interesting in that it was made by, for, and about the members of one particular subculture, independent from any outsider influence. It is also impressive that such a documentary was made in the first place, pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars from thousands of supportive fans who wanted the record “set straight,” as it were, hoping to get a filmic product that would argue for the legitimacy of the show and its surrounding fandom instead of the usual, blanket cynical media representations of all involved. This documentary was supposed to communicate why bronies were fine, average, relatable, people. This was their thesis.
The director, Laurent Malaquais, and certainly the most visible of the executive producers, actor John de Lancie, set out with good intentions to argue their view and to give bronies a public mirror less cracked and warped in which to view their community. However, somewhere along the way, they just ended up makng too many mirrors, covering up the holes with tin foil and throwing on a sickening helping of silver lining. Somewhere along the way to proving bronies to be decent and normal, Malaquais and de Lancie showed them to be great, proud, and perfect. The Bronies documentary is a great example of how depicting a subject with such an overpowering bias can make that subject seem much more like caricatures given exaggerated voice and much less like real people. The documentary we have is confusing and alienating to anyone caught on the outside looking in, off-putting and unwelcoming to the audience that they wanted to convince. I can’t help but expect that the driving thought was, “the bronies will like it,” as the whole mess spiraled towards the poorer side of mediocrity.
If I had to place the blame on one group, it would be Malaquais and his production team. $320,000 is a relative wealth of money when it comes to making any sort of microbudget documentary. However, further investigation of the filmographies of Malaquais and his team reveals a great number of embarrassing television shows, most for TLC. The average budget of an episode of a season-length schlock-reality TV show, such as those Malaquais has worked on previously, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000. Cheap to make, in TV terms, and cheap in look from start to finish. The process of making such shows is a creative sinkhole and Malaquais’s inexperience when it comes to depicting a worthy and interesting subject feeds into an unsure and unclear vision for the whole Bronies project. His documentary feels like a cheap episode of reality TV rather than any creative accomplishment.
Subjects are picked up and dropped on a whim. In the first half hour it feels like we are being thrown around a speed dating course, meeting a large handful of subjects in no time at all and jumping off to the next right as the former seemed to be on the verge of saying something unique. No breathing room is given to the “average bronies,” who make up the majority of the subjects in doc, to really explain much about why they like the show, how they enjoy the show, how it has affected them other than the standard answer that “it has.” Some fandom-famous figures such as the musician The Living Tombstone are given more time to talk about their connection to the phenomenon, but they are immediately placed upon a pedestal and given a worshipping, cloying respect, leaving people outside of the fandom lost as to their importance as they are rarely presented with an informative introduction.
The editing is slapdash and amateurish. Talking heads are intercut with inane, sometimes senseless footage in order to add visual interest. A young fan named Lyle talks about his parents’ wariness about him spending too much money at Bronycon while B-roll of Lyle’s mother cooking pasta creeps along in the background. More of the family’s spaghetti dinner returns in another scene. Seated interviews with brony experts taken at the convention involve the interviewee sliding across the frame and sometimes cross-dissolving from one side to the other in a laughable attempt to add visual punch to an interview that would have been perfectly serviceable without a meddling editor. Tonal inconsistencies abound out of the team’s attempts to cover as much ground as they can. An understandably heavy anecdote about anti-gay bullying flies into a light-hearted segment about voice acting. The insistent transitions and heavy-handed music only exacerbate things.
Not all of it is bad. While the rubbish presentation dilutes most of what is presented, some voices are strong enough that they grab your attention despite the structural flaws. The voice actors, John de Lancie and Tara Strong, and the show’s creator, Lauren Faust, have a lot to say about the creativity and inspiration that went into making the show and the application of such thought elsewhere. Their ideas concerning the fandom emphatically reflect their personalities as unique, artistic people, and I would assume that the extras DVD containing their extended interviews would be a solid watch. De Lancie especially holds a very interesting position in the fandom pantheon as a memorable guest star who was pulled into the fandom long after he played his role and who has embraced its enthusiasm fully. The British brony, an autistic young man has a very self-aware voice and a genuine happiness to him that was very luckily left intact through the cutting and editing. Also, while all of these young fans get thrown together into a general mush, the parents interviewed appear to be the people who occupy the most interesting space in relation to this very young fandom. They are usually presented as engaged in the lives of their children and certainly very accepting and loving, but each to various degrees and through various methods. These are three different aspects of the documentary that could very well have stood as solid satellite documentaries to this one. However, all thrown into the same pot, the stories overflow with information and lose focus.
This documentary is an opaque, alien artifact; poorly crafted to a fault, so scratched up as to be an indecipherable jumble to anyone not completely versed in the show and its fandom. There is a curious, cultural milestone to the fact that this is how a fandom decided to present itself, but the quality just isn’t there. Bronies, unfortunately, has doomed itself to being a documentary that people will talk about, but that no one will study.
Originally published as a customer review on Amazon on 3/15/2013
