You all know what I thought of the original fic, which is why I'd like to say that I'm going to be reviewing this movie as

I am going to put aside my vitriol for the source material, and judge its merits unironically. As a story, it was broken from its inception. But how does it fare as a movie?

 

Somebody just had to go make a movie out of the most overrated shitfic in the brony fandom. And that somebody is Youtuber StormXF3, well known for his MLP In Real Life series, and his Green Screen Ponies series.

 

In either case, Storm's work shows some very technically impressive animation and editing. He clearly has a knack for film making, and in some respects, he shows it in this movie. Little Orphan Blue was edited almost seamlessly into the live action footage, and doesn't really seem to have any glaring animation bugs.

 

The cinematography, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. Storm used a great camera to film this movie, but didn't really do a damn thing with it. Most camera shots are static, lifeless, and dull. They certainly show what needs to be shown, but with little to no added creativity or flair.

 

Supposedly, the story takes place in a city, but there may have been only a couple city shots in the entire film. Most of where the movie takes place is obviously suburban, or even rural.

 

There are even times when the main character is talking, and the camera just boringly focuses on his torso. No angling, no depth, no technique or finesse whatsoever, just a plain old frontal, centered shot of the actor's torso.

 

There is also one rather curious design choice that stems from the cinematography, but I'll get to that in a minute.

 

The story is exactly what you'd expect. Guy finds Blu Pone in a box, guy watches Blu Pone grow up, fuck-all is accomplished, and in the end, Celestia goes all CPS on his ass and brings her back home to Equestria.

 

There's some differences from the original, but somehow they seem to be for the worse. In the fic, Blu Pone developed an interest in Nascar, and Mopy took her to an off-screen NASCAR rally. In the movie, they could have chosen to show the rally, but instead, they just dropped everything relating to NASCAR altogether. This makes Blu Pone even more bland and distant from her namesake than she was originally, since what scarce little personality she had in the first place has been completely wiped away.

 

I wish I could say that's the film's worst problem, but it's not. Picture this, aspiring film makers: you round up all these great voice actors to portray Blu Pone, Celestia, and the Mane 5, with Celestia in particular being an almost dead-on sound alike, but when it comes to casting the most crucial role, the voice that we hear throughout 99% or the entire movie, the narrator AND main human protagonist, whom the story almost entirely revolves around, you pick the most unintentionally hilarious voice of all time.

 

The narrator is awful. He is not only awful, he is The Christmas Tree "You always win when you are good" awful. He almost has the voice for the role, but his acting is so fake, so disconnected from the plot that it sounds like he recorded his lines without even knowing what the story was about. He flubs the inflection on almost every line, and you could tell Storm rarely, if ever, asked him for a do-over. It would be an understatement to say he is difficult to take seriously.

 

But it gets even worse. Remember that peculiar design choice I mentioned back when I was talking about the cinematography? Someone apparently had the brilliant idea to hide the main character's face through the whole movie, have the live actor (who, BTW, is Storm) never utter a single word of dialogue the whole time, and instead have the narrator just provide his voice as well.

 

And I don't mean he's a silent protagonist and the narrator is describing his actions, I mean they LITERALLY dub over Storm's headless pantomimes with the obviously disembodied narrator voice throughout the entire movie.

 

If the movie was impossible to take seriously before, now it's reaching Birdemic levels of amazing. Literally everything the main character does is filmed by taking pantomimes that even the silent era would find awful, with absolutely zero facial expressions to go with them, and dubbing it over with the most comically ridiculous narrator voice of all time.

 

I can't even do justice to how mind-blowing this looks in action. You just need to see for yourself, it's truly something to behold. Imagine a comedy show wherein a Morgan Freeman impersonator read aloud the script of The Room, while his partner dressed up as a mime, put a bag over his head, and then mimed all the adorable goings-on between Wisseu and friends. That still wouldn't be as funny as watching My Little Dashie: The Movie.

 

In conclusion, when you separate this movie from its abysmal source material, it still fails hard on its own merits. Heck, even as an adaptation of the fic, it somehow manages to have even less emotion and less personality than the crapfic it was adapted from.

 

If there's one good thing that came out of this movie, it's that it finally crosses MLD over into "so bad it's good" territory. The original was condescending and manipulative, which made it about as fun to read as Kanye West's autobiography. The movie, on the other hand, is so obviously devoid of any legitimate value that it succeeds solely on camp value.

 

If Dusk's Dawn was our fandom's The Room, then MLD: The Movie is our Plan 9 from Outer Space.

 

Now can someone get to work on making our Citizen Kane?