#budget things

So first things first, let’s make the distinction between what these two pictures are. Sonic the Hedgehog (2019) is a live action... well I hesitate to call it a “blockbuster”, but it’s a special-effects heavy action movie. It has big name actors, location shooting, all that fun stuff. The My Little Pony movie is a 90 minute TV special that accidentally found its way to a theatrical release.

Lemme take a step back from what’s on the screen and take a look at the economics of these productions. I’m largely just speculating this part, but bear with me. The way the Sonic movie makes the most sense to me as a venture for Sega is if the movie studio pays them for the rights to the property, and then any royalties they make are gravy. If the movie bombs, they’ve already been paid for the rights, and it’s not like Sonic’s reputation can get much worse, so there’s not a lot to lose. That puts it on the heads of the studios and distributors to turn the movie into a profit-making venture, so the movie gets a big boy budget. Nothing too extreme? But like, it’s about the same budget that Shazam got.

Meanwhile, the objective of the MLP movie is first and foremost, to sell toys. The value of the movie is how many playsets it sells. As such, how good the movie is is a secondary concern, behind how many views it converts into toy sales. Add to this that they basically went with the same crew in the same studio, and you’re looking at what Dan Olson calls a Made-for-TV-Plus movie. A lot of the budget has probably gone towards getting the big names into the recording studio for like a day each (Sia’s time must have been very expensive), and the animation crew got paid for a long TV episode. Some comparable budgets include the Ouija movie and Air Buddies.

What I’m trying to communicate here is that the purpose of these two movies is different and that explains why their budgets are so different. As for “doing more with less”, well, you can probably blame some decision-making at Blur Studio for what they’ve ended up with, but I’m less interested in that. My big point here is that the MLP movie is a poor “bang for your buck” example because its shoestring budget really shows if you look closely. I don’t want to completely ruin it for anyone who doesn’t want to know, so all of that is in the section below, and nothing else.

The switch to Toon Boom and the use of some frame-by-frame animation in the hero scenes in the movie, together with some tactical 3D, charming writing and the general creativity of the settings do a lot to paper over the shortcuts taken in the animation. However, it’s pretty clear that a lot of the budget went to these really important scenes, and some of the scenes got only just enough attention to get them out the door. (Princess and the Frog had a $105M budget. They didn’t spend that all on champagne and truffles, kids.)

In a lot of crowd shots you’ll see duplicated animation, you’ll see background characters hold still for very long periods of time, and a real tell of puppet animation is characters sticking to the same few angles. Toon Boom’s deformers help with smoothing in and out of them and avoiding the snap you see in the Flash-made show when characters have to turn, but you can still kiiinda see it. It’s there when characters slide into frame holding a kind of musical-theatre 3/4 tilt, it’s characters running just very slightly out of angle with where they’re supposed to be going, it’s the awkward floaty bobbing motion of background characters, it’s the same mouth shapes showing up again and again and again.

This is to say nothing of the TV-like cinematography that bleeds in in a few places. When the movie’s being intense or dramatic or awestriking,  it gets very cinematic - lots of close-ups, big sweeping long shots of dramatic prog rock backdrops (painted stills, natch), tight angles close to the ground, that kind of thing. But then when it doesn’t need to do that, we’re commonly back to simple wides and holding on the same frame just slightly uncomfortably too long.