Author’s Note: This is Part 1 of my Rainbow Rocks review. Click here for Part 2. Click here for Part 3.

It's no secret that I hate this spinoff.

Back when newer details emerged out from the leaks, my blasé opinion of it turned incredibly negative because, as a feminist, it went completely against the pro-feminist values of the show, Lauren Faust herself, and My Little Pony as a franchise. (I'm surprised how I didn't get angry over Flash Sentry at the time, which is different compared to now.) I had no hope for it, and my predictions came true and then some. Not only is its writing worse than Rainbow Falls. It also eventually overtook Rainbow Falls as my most hated "episode" of the show.

Then the Rainbow Rocks shorts were published, and there was very little that changed my feelings towards it. Music to My Ears is really good, but almost all of them lacked the charm that FIM inherently has. As a reviewer, I decided to watch Rainbow Rocks to see if there were any improvements. After two initial watchthroughs, I thoroughly disliked it, but decided to go back to get somewhat of a better understanding. The final verdict? Rainbow Rocks is a haphazard, obnoxious mess, but varying degrees of effort offer hope for its future.

Strengths

Technical Improvements.

In the last movie, the animation's errors were very glaring. Albeit crisp and clean to look at, the behavior of the anatomy was extremely rigid. Their running, walking, and bending lacked any naturality nor proper mobility. This is especially a problem in three areas:

1. The characters running in front view. When their legs, ankles, and knees bent up, it looked incredibly awkward, as if DHX had plenty of trouble to make it look good without remaking the puppets. You can really see this problem in Music to My Ears when Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle run toward and past Vinyl Scratch: from the side and three-quarter view, it's fine.
   
2. The walk cycle lacked any sense of bounce. Take a look at how the ponies walk. There's a lot of bending, and the mobility of the characters is smooth and natural. But when the humans walked, their bodies were completely straight and inflexible.
   
3. The classmates' robotic dancing to conclude Win the Crown. Need I say more?
   

To point to the main flaw of the animation, it lacked one of the biggest principles: squash and stretch.

You can read more about it here, but in animation, the purpose of the squash and stretch is to create a fluent, exaggerated effect of the object. The squash and stretch helps liven up the characters beyond just their lips or objects. The way they act and move develops a personality, and squash and stretch accentuates this process.

This technical detail is visible in Rainbow Rocks. Their walk and run cycles are very natural because they aren't so stiff. In particularly the walk cycle, there's a subtle bounce as they walk. You witness this improvement very early when the Dazzlings exit Sugarcube Corner in the prologue, and it continues elsewhere in scenes like Pinkie's kitchen with Maud in the middleground. It never lets down…well, except one point, which I'll get to.

Adding to that is the movement of the clothes and hair. Each time the characters move, their hair sways. Or when Rarity pulls in her line of clothes, it doesn't stay still. The clothes on the hangers sway a bit until it stops, reminding the audience how inertia doesn't stop a object that suddenly stills.

Along with the natural walk and run movements, there's a lot more care to the little expressive details. In EQG, the main animations were there, but the lack of polish made the flash animation very plain. Now that DHX knows how to work with their puppets, they can play more games, and the high degree of refinement reveals that.

I already described the more refined movements of the hair and clothes, and I'll analyze two specific examples.

1.  
   
    
   
    
   
    
    
    
   Lighting isn't like a blanket. It shines wherever it wants to and casts a shadow when not. In the kitchen, DHX wasn't putting a blanket on the darkness with a ball of light and making the characters too bright. They observed where the light would logically hit their hair, faces, limbs, and rest of the room. Here, the main light source is the lamp above the cutting table; when Sunset showed up, the light from the fridge temporarily becomes a secondary source. The transition from light to dark was first introduced in The Show Stoppers and used prominently in Sleepless in Ponyville. The drawback is how the sharp transition ruins the rounding effect and flattens the shapes. In season four, DHX/Top Draw introduced the blur to their animation, which smooths the transition from light to dark better and recreates a more believable illusion of depth.
    
   More importantly, this technique solidifies illusions of tension, mystery, and concentration. Twilight is all alone in the kitchen, trying to concentrate. The absence of light brings our attention to the subjects and puts our focus on specific points of the scene. In Equestria Girls, this ability to try to create the rounding effect was lacking, mainly the confrontation in the dark hallway and the climax.
    
   Focus on the hands in the first image, for it comes into play in the competition.
   
2.  
   
    
    
    
   In the first movie, Twilight's adaptation to her human was extremely rushed. Since Twilight lived as a pony throughout her life, it made no sense for her to adapt to her human form so quickly. To make it worse, instead of treating the transition with grace, Twilight's incapability to function as a human was the butt of several jokes that died after Spike pushed open the school door.
    
   Rather than retconning it, Twilight retains some pony tendencies (the other her inability to write or spell). This time, it's not written as a throwaway joke, but a legitimate dilemma that only contributes to the conflict. No matter how hard she tries to write a counterspell, she screws up partially because she can't write without her horn. Whenever she stands on the stage and gets nervous, her hands curl up to a fist akin to a pony's hooves.
   

The first movie lacked subtlety in their animation. Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks's never forgot it, and that's a HUGE improvement given the size of the project.

Music variety.

Listen to the songs from the prequel. While the messages are very different, their compositions are extremely similar. This Strange New World/Time to Come Together and Equestria Girls/This Is Our Big Night/A Friend for Life are very samey. Combined with a lack of creative, catchy rhythm beyond just one, the music feels really safe and merely panders to tween girls.

Here? The tones and compositions have a lot more variety. You can hear a substantial difference in the way they not only play, but structured, also. And that's really hard considering the genre. Modern pop music's greatest flaw is its limited delivery. But RR is able to bend it, yet not break, but not having one song feel identical to others, even when their tones are similar, like Let's Have a Battle, Under Our Spell, and the Dazzlings' half of Welcome to Our Show.

Another magnificent strength is their catchiness. Many of the songs' meters are very sharp and follow along a very bouncy rhythm. By making the songs catchy, they become memorable, and you'll want to either hum or sing along. The intro song, Under Our Spell, and Shine Like Rainbows fit into that category.

Most importantly, the songs greatly impact the story. Except its most popular song, every single in-narrative song in EQG is during a montage. While that's fine in general, they were there for no reason other than to rush the pace and fill dead space. Instead, Rainbow Rocks takes a more direct approach to the songs via a thorough musical narrative.

Two very hilarious jokes: the photobomb and Rarity's Daft Punk costume.

1. What helped make the photobomb work so well is how it's something Spike would really do. Whenever teens gather together and have fun, one is to take pictures of themselves through selfies as a way to remember their day. You can tell that Rarity, Sunset, and Fluttershy were having fun and wanted to take it as a way to show it. But knowing Spike's mischief, 'twas great timing.
   
2. Daft Punk is very modern pop culture, but this joke came as a big surprise, and her retort is classic Rarity. The Daft Punk reference is such a great under-my-radar accentuation to the joke that even a few years from now, it might never age.
    
   This film isn't kind to Rarity (or any of the M6, for that matter). This is easily her finest moment ahead of the photobomb.
   

A more straightforward story.

One of Equestria Girls's biggest problems is resolved by streamlining the story. Previously, its biggest goal was retrieving Twilight's crown, but there were so many subplots that came and went far too quickly, so the story lacked any focus. We know the final goal, but without a solid middle, the journey becomes empty and pointless.

Here, the focus is much tighter. You know exactly what the Dazzlings planned, so you know the final goal, too. But the HuMane Five have to figure out how to defeat them, so they plan their way through the Battle of the Bands. Because the structure is much simpler, the audience has a clear idea where it's going, how long it'll take to resolve, and not get interrupted by too many unnecessary subplots.

In fact, there are four subplots in Rainbow Rocks.

1. The HuMane Six are great friends out of the band, but when they plan to form as the Rainbooms, they have no chemistry. Too many people want to get involved, but some characters' egos are far too inflated, marginalizing their talents. This started really early when Fluttershy wanted the Rainbooms can play her song, only for Dash — the self-proclaimed leader — to reject it.
   
2. Sunset Shimmer's redemption. Following the prequel, she was justifiably an outcast thanks to her longtime cruelty. Only her friends supported her through the length, while the Dazzlings play mind games in order to deepen her self-doubt and cause more inner conflict with the Rainbooms.
   
3. For the duration of the film, Fluttershy anxiously wanted to play her song. But Dash constantly rejected it because she felt it lacked energy and fervor; and the audience was reminded of it until they finally played it in the climax.
   
4. Twilight's mission to write the counterspell, which I explained in the animation segment above.
   

All of the subplots don't come ago in the span of a couple of minutes. They intertwine with each other, last for the length of the movie, and directly impact the conflict. As a result of having them intertwine, the conflicts behave like a semi-natural part of the story instead of an idea shoved at the last minute. The polish allows for a more coherent narrative to flow from beginning to end.

But can it be done better? Could it be simplified and streamlined more? Definitely on both, and we'll get to that in Part 2.

Resolution of one major question mark.

In Equestria Girls, there were several gigantic WTF moments. One of the biggest is the fact that Twilight Sparkle slept in Canterlot High's library. A gigantic subtext of Equestria Girls is the characters' ability to live in a world similar to ours. Unlike Golden Oaks Library, the school library would not tolerate anyone sleeping in. Typically, security would check the library to see if anyone was staying there for too long. Once spotted, they're escorted out. In Equestria Girls, Twilight sleeps openly in the library; not only wasn't she caught, the script tolerated this breech. Any sensible school library would not let that happen. In Rainbow Rocks, this plot hole was resolved by having Pinkie et al. sleep over at her house.

(Link to the quoted passage.)

Pay attention to the bold. When Twilight tried to go to the school to sleep, Pinkie changed that very quickly by arranging for a slumber party. Despite being resolved in the form of a joke, it's extremely self-aware from its obvious meta commentary. McCarthy nor any of DHX never stated what Twilight Sparkle did was stupid beyond recognition, but it implies how DHX realized it and wanted to put an end to it for good. It reminds me how Andrew Brenner from Thomas & Friends hilariously concluded Henry's Special Coal discontinuity in King of the Railway (a point railway consultant Sam Wilkinson suggested he keep in even though Brenner wanted to remove it).

Well, until a certain Christmas comic took matters into its own hands…

The other is the collective following of the students in the cafeteria makes a hell of a lot more sense. Sure, EQG (Cafeteria Song) was catchy in all, but do you really think every single person would be immediately swayed by a group of teens, particularly during a time right after Sunset Shimmer, Snips, and Snails cyberbullied Twilight? In the sequel, the Sirens were able to fix this problem by using their powers as a way to manipulate the crowd into turning against each other.

Sirens' lore.

Back when teasers appeared, speculation was aplenty about who the Dazzlings were. One of the theories was how they were Sirens because their beautiful voices, excellent ability to sing, and sensual bouncing of their hips seduced the crowd into being followers. According to their mythological background, Sirens are Greek mythological femme fetales who used their beautiful singing voices to lure nearby sailors to shipwreck onto their land. As beautiful as their voices were, they were also incredibly evil, but also too adult for a family-friendly product like FIM. So, it was altered and sanitized to make appropriate (think how Disney sanitized Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty), and it really works conceptually.

Yet, albeit a much cleaner version, it doesn't disrespect the lore. Part of what made the Sirens who they are is their ability to seduce others. If the Dazzlings couldn't seduce the audience, then DHX could've told us they were Sirens, but they truly weren't, thus disrespecting the foundations of collective European mythology.

Patience to maturity.

Magical Mystery Cure was very divisive for the terrible execution of a rushed Twilicorn concept. Second-most was Keep Calm and Flutter On for three reasons:

1. The pacing to redeeming Discord is incredibly rushed.
   
2. The writing decisions to make Discord a neutral character at least was handled terribly. Celestia's logic to why she wanted Discord released is extremely flimsy because she indicates how she wants to control Discord, and harnessing the Mane Six (and Fluttershy) to do it without guidance makes her look like a tyrant. When Fluttershy explained her tactics to "befriend" Discord, she blatantly played with his emotions by saying she only wanted to be his friend to control him.
   
3. In total, Keep Calm's moral of friendship is how you must manipulate others and take advantage of others' weaknesses just to turn a new leaf. This is where Twilight's Kingdom did a much better job executing Discord's permanent switch to the good side: because he fell for Tirek's mind games, he understood both his big mistake and how much they cared (t an certain level). The fact that Twilight forgave him even though he betrayed her in front of her other friends is a testament to her character.
   

In Rainbow Rocks, Sunset Shimmer's path to redemption wasn't rushed. From the get-go, she had a ton of trouble fitting into the rest of Canterlot High, and for good reasons outlined earlier. When everyone justifiably couldn't stand her, Sunset grew humble, and she concentrated a lot on her reputation, which ate her up. In the cafeteria, she felt very worried that the Dazzlings knew a lot about Sunset's reputation, resulting in resting her cupped head on the table.

The transition to her growth began with her conversation with Twilight in the kitchen, easily the best point in the film. Earlier, when Sunset extended her arm to help Twilight, she resisted because of what happened prior. That night, they had a really casual, if not awkward, conversation in the kitchen, helping to ease whatever tension they had left. Twilight couldn't figure out how to write the counterspell, but Sunset assured her she can do it.

But where it truly solidified occurred in two spots: at the end of the kitchen scene and after Sunset interrupted Awesome as I Wanna Be.

1. 
   Sunset Shimmer: [yawns] I better get some sleep. Good luck with the counter-spell. Not that you'll need it. *from the background, as Twilight looks down nervously at her counterspell* This must be nothing compared with the stuff you're expected to deal with as a princess in Equestria.
    
   Twilight Sparkle: *looks up sharply* Sunset Shimmer?
    
   [sunset looks back]
    
   Twilight Sparkle: ...Never mind. It's not important.
    
   [sunset smiles and heads off to bed]
    
   Twilight Sparkle (with determination): No, I have to be able to do this. I have to.

   Even though they broke down whatever tension prior, Sunset's confidence that Twilight can write her counterspell (possibly to the point of raising expectations too far for everyone's own good) foreshadowed eventual tension later on. Their forced smiles indicate an unease in the chemistry. For Sunset Shimmer, this is especially so, for she spends most of her time backstage.
   
2. Prior to Dash's debut song, to buy themselves time, they decided to play some of their weaker songs so the Dazzlings had no idea what hit them. Unfortunately, that planned was nearly ruined when their Equestrian magic nearly came to life. Sunset realized this and broke up the song.
    
   Big mistake.
    
   Everyone booed the living hell out of her, and Sunset was really embarrassed. A great path to redemption and development is how you don't succeed every time. Sometimes a character has to screw up. For her, in a BIG way, for it nearly cost them a trip to the finals.
    
   To highlight this mistake more, everyone grew very cross at her and, for that time, completely forgot about the counterspell. But Sunset was very justified in her actions, because it kept them ahead of the curve. When the climax hit, it was Sunset's time to make up for lost time and prove her self-worth.
   

If you want to read Part 2, click here. Click here for Part 3.