I am not going to review A Brony Tale in a vacuum. I try to, I do. But there is another Brony based documentary that I reviewed this year. Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony, it cames out in 2012, two years ago, at a much higher point of the My Little Pony popularity. I mean, it came out before My Little Pony: Equestria Girls!
This one apparently has a much stricter focus. It is specificually about Ashleigh Bell. “Who is Ashleigh Bell? Kill yourself!”
Ashleigh Bell is a voice actress and singer, made most famous for voicing two of the five ponies, Rainbow Dash and Apple Jack. She is now a huge deal to a community and she doesn’t know how to cope.
I guess with the title of A Brony Tale, it makes sense to be about one person. One Brony. Not sure which Brony though, because Ashleigh doesn’t refer to herself as one ever and only talks about them as groups of people.
If Ashleigh wanted to be about 20% cooler, she would call herself a Brony as well.
Oh man, if you wanted to learn a lot about Ashleigh Bell in a documentary, you still didn’t come to the right place. “What?” you may ask. “You don’t learn a lot about Ashleigh Bell in a documentary about Ashleigh Bell? But it is 80 minutes long!”
I know right. You get the basic information. What she did before MLP, her band, her first Brony experience, but you don’t delve anywhere. Mostly I think because the documentary seems to focus mostly on other people and not her. We get some random person who started a famous MLP page. We got several Bronies defending their hobby and the idea of masculinity. We get a MLP history lesson. Basically, we get a lot of things we got in the previous documentary, but in worse less focused ways.
This documentary is an incredible waste of time. Like, it is jarring to see a person go from regular voice to a cartoon character and it can freak me out too. But that doesn’t make this a great documentary. I watched the whole thing and I still don’t know why she had to spend so much documentary time wondering if she even wanted to go to the BroNYC Con or whatever. Of course you want to go and be worshipped and make cash. Why make an easy decision seem like a hard one. Fake drama for your documentary? I don”t know.
Just. Ugh. The last Brony documentary was just a pointless circle jerk. This is like an even more pointless slight arousal that gets wasted.