Do you think MLPs will ever look like horses again?
With love and respect, those aren't even really human faced horses. I love human faced horses. I love centaurs, I love silenoi, I love these monstrosities
I don't know how to describe mlp g5. I watched the movie and it was cute, but I just couldn't get around to the designs. They look like vaguely horse-flavored cocomelon, to me
To completely forward facing eyes, the ears kinda-but-not-really on the side of their heads, the wide dog-like mouths, the tiny muzzle, almost like and afterthought. And the necks. The necks are definitely human shaped, sticking straight up and connecting at the base of the skull like only a human neck does.
I know it's low-hanging fruits, and I don't blame anyone who likes them, but they just do not appeal to me.
MY THESIS for this is that the Main source of the uncannyness in the designs is the tiny nose and detached mouth, which is caused in part due to how it you look at the silhouettes and shapes of each character's face, you can see natural places where it looks like there should be a muzzle. then on the actual designs it turns out that's actually the outline of the cheek and the mouth and nose are in the middle of nowhere!
Here's my like 5 second shitty paint over where I changed nothing about the designs except the mouth and nose positions and shapes:
With the exception of a few gag shots, typically the early MLP gen 4 formula for success was to keep the ponies' muzzles in a 3/4 position unless necessary for them to be facing forward, and to keep the mouth connected to the nose in these shots. I think that's shown pretty well in this pic from the fim movie, which is imo a genuinely impressive and beautiful movie
What's crazy is that the increasing number of weird detached expressions were one of the main critiques of the later seasons of gen 4 and used as evidence of their declining animation quality:
So it is sort of weird that they just went full tilt into that for every character all the time for g5. Tbh my theory is that because the artists in gen 4 were like legit horse girls referencing the older MLP gens (which, though stylized, were still fairly horse-like) and probably some real horses in the stylization process. But now that gen 4 was such a success, the style of gen 5 isn't being inspired by real horses anymore, it's being inspired by gen 4. So it's like stylization inbreeding LOL.
Based on some interviews with Lauren Faust and tweets from Imalou, one of the g5 character designers, it also feels like g4's mantra was more "what if these horse characters were given human traits", while g5's is more similar to "what if these human characters had horse traits". Imalou said they were given a pretty vague description for each of the g5 characters and were kind of just told to go ham with it (eg. Instruction for designing Pipp was just like "1920s flapper girl" and that was pretty much it). So human characteristics -> horse design. Whereas Faust had the character designs already from previous generations and had her own headcanons of what they would be like, so the process went from horse design -> adding characteristics that fit that vision.
