New to VOD this week: A BRONY TALE
Brent Hodge’s look at MY LITTLE PONY’s adult fandom had its world premiere this Spring at Tribeca. Its fest circuit has included DOXA, Seattle, Calgary Underground, and New Zealand’s Documentary Edge, among others.
Like the other, very similar documentary profile on this subculture, Laurent Malaquais’ BRONIES: THE EXTREMELY UNEXPECTED ADULT FANS OF MY LITTLE PONY, Hodge weaves together portraits of various fans, possible explanations for the phenomenon, and a climax at a Brony convention, while using a performer from the show as a tour guide of sorts through the fandom. His choice of featured subject is his personal friend, Ashleigh Ball, who voices two roles on the latest version of the franchise, and whose invitation to attend BronyCon ostensibly serves as the impetus for the filmmaker’s project. She’s an appealing enough point of identification for a general audience – while part of the show, she’s not herself a brony – though she seriously overplays her wariness, unconvincingly hemming and hawing about whether she should accept a free trip to NYC, while scenes about her non-Pony-related music career are nothing more than gratuitous plugs. While Hodge explores the unorthodox nature of the fanbase through some of his interview subjects – chiefly a pair of psychologists who have been studying the phenomena – he seems more interested in simply celebrating its positivity, which is fine enough. Where the film overreaches, however, is through those psychologists, who proffer the theory that bronies are a response to 9/11 the way that hippies were the product of Vietnam. While there’s something to be said for the fandom’s earnest, non-cynical embrace of the show’s very basic concepts of cooperation and friendship, it’s going many steps too far to suggest such an import for a small fringe subculture without any practical agenda beyond entertainment and community.
what (not) to doc 