TL;DR: Littlest Pet Shop is a good show.  If you like MLP (and if you're reading this, then you obviously do), then you'll like LPS.  If you're interested, go watch it before reading this blog.

This is going to be a spoiler-ridden discussion of Littlest Pet Shop.  I gave LPS a shot because the animation and art style is extremely similar to FIM, and about half of the staff from FIM worked on LPS.  I wasn't disappointed.  It's quite good.  It's no Pony, for sure, but good.  I recommend it.

The series follows Blythe Baxter, a teenage girl who, for some unexplained reason, has the ability to talk to animals.  In this universe, all animals talk, but humans can't normally understand them.  Blythe can talk to them and they can talk to her.  Everyone else just hears the expected animal barks, chirps, and chatters, but Blythe hears human language.  She lives in the big city with her single, windowed dad.  Though it's never explicitly stated, her mom is obviously deceased.  Blythe works at Littlest Pet Shop and has various adventures and capers with her pet friends, as well as human friends.

Unlike Pony, LPS is low-stakes.  Very low.  Like, zero stakes.  By that I mean that there are no villains, no battles, no existential threats, and no world-saving.  It's just average, everyday life adventures, albeit slightly more exciting than the average person's life.  I'd equate it to Hey Arnold!, but with a dash of fantasy thrown in.  It's basically a girly Hey Arnold! if Arnold had Fluttershy's animal whispering ability.  It's just light, cute, simple, fluff.  Not much in the way of arcs.  But there's nothing wrong with that.  Sometimes cute, simple fluff is nice.  It's low-stress.  There wasn't really any way to screw it up because nothing really happens. 

The only antagonists to speak of are Blythe's rich, spoiled, bratty classmates, the Biskit twins.  They pick on Blythe and try to make her life miserable when they can, but they're not evil monsters.  Just jerks.  Basically S1 Trixie with no magic.  Actually they're most like Veruca Salt.  It's like if Veruca had a twin sister.  Ugh.  *Shudders*    It did annoy me a bit that the Biskits always got away with their bullsh*t with no accountability.  There wasn't any redemption arc, either.  They were just b*tches to the end.

LPS has the occasional musical number like FIM, but unfortunately nowhere near as good.  For the most part, the songs were unnecessary and forgettable at best, and annoying at worst.  There were two decent exceptions: Just Stay Here Forever, and Just Unplug.  Those were good.  And the opening theme is good, too.  Other than that, meh.

The pets were cute and enjoyable to watch, but I honestly liked watching Blythe with her human friends much more.  My favorite character besides Blythe herself was her Korean classmate and BFF, Youngmee Song.  She was freaking adorable.  Funny thing, when Blythe first said her name, I was so confused.  I didn't realize that it was a name, and I thought Blythe was talking about her younger, past self.  Y'know how, like, people will sometimes engage in the therapeutic exercise of writing a letter to their younger self to... like... tell them it gets better or something.  I thought it was something like that, but the context made no sense.  I figured it out pretty quickly.    I just loved Youngmee. 

Another nice touch was Blythe ever-changing outfits.  She's an aspiring fashion designer, and thus her outfits and hairstyle change in every episode, which is extremely refreshing and impressive for an animated show.  That's a lot of extra assets.  That detail was much appreciated.

Perhaps one of the greatest moments in television history, though, was when Blythe dressed as Applejack for Halloween.  It was actually one of those costumes where it looks like you're riding the animal, but your legs are inside just walking.  Actually, that scene didn't really happen, per se.  It was a ghost story that Blythe was telling the pets on Halloween.  So, she imagined and described herself as riding Applejack, and we got to see it.  Point is, AJ was in the show.  Mind blown.

Another wonderful moment came in an episode where Blythe was entering one of the pets in a dog beauty pageant.  Blythe (voiced by Ashleigh Ball, remember) got carried away with the competition and for some odd reason started channeling one of the other competitors who happened to have a country western accent.  Blythe normally sounds like a slightly higher-pitched, slightly smoother Rainbow Dash, and she transformed into Applejack right before our ears.  It was glorious.  And it wasn't the only time something like that happened, either.  Buttercream is a female bunny voiced by Cathy Weseluck, and in one episode she gets mad and competitive, and her tough side comes out, and she transforms into Spike.  That was amazing as well.

I definitely could have done with the character's heads being just a tad smaller, but I did appreciate that they routinely made self-aware jokes about their oversized heads.

This show plays a bit fast and loose with physics and reality, which is to be expected, but it's a bit too much for my taste at times.  I am not at all averse to over-the-top slapstick cartoons if that's the whole foundational vision, like Rocko's Modern Life, one of my favorite cartoons of all time, but I don't care for it when shows appear to take themselves relatively seriously, but then stray too far from reality.  LPS takes itself just seriously enough that the physics breaks annoy me.  What grinds my gears the most is actually the show's repeated tendency to disregard time when it comes to the characters completing projects.  We very frequently see one or two teenage girls accomplish in an afternoon what it would take a large, professional work crew at least a month to do.  That annoyed me.  Pony did its fair share of that, but not to the same extent. and unicorn magic went a long way towards patching those plotholes.

One other thing that annoyed me for most of the series was the fact that Blythe kept her animal whispering ability a secret, even from her closest friends and her dad.  Why do these things always have to be a secret?!  Like, seriously.  Blythe did finally tell Youngmee the secret, which was a very exciting scene.  Unfortunately, they didn't do enough with it afterward.  They had a couple of scenes later in the show when Blythe translates for Youngmee so she can talk to her own pet, but not nearly enough.  That was a bit of wasted potential, in my opinion.

My one any only big wishlist item for the entire show was that Blythe tell her dad the big secret.  Her dad, Roger, was portrayed as a bit of daft, bumbling goof, but at the same time a highly devoted, loving father who was incredibly attuned to his daughter.  He would definitely understand and not judge her.  They were extremely close, and thus it annoyed me that she didn't seem to trust him enough.  I wanted Blythe to tell him so badly, and I even had my own vision for how I wanted it to go--something that I never imagined they would actually do.  I was beginning to think that my only wishlist item would go unfulfilled, but then the writers surprised me, and magic happened.

In the series finale, Blythe finally tells her dad about her ability, and his response could not have been better.  He simply said, "Yeah, I know.  I've known all along."    Exactly what I wanted him to say.  They read my mind!    This was instantly refreshing--finally a cartoon character that's not an oblivious idiot.  (Take that, Marinette and Adrien.  )  I mean, her dad really should have known, too--it was something that would have been abundantly obvious to any parent who isn't completely blind to their child's life.  So, after her initial shock, Blythe asks him why he never said anything, and he replied, "Because I knew that you would bring it up in your own time, when you were ready."  I personally don't think that it's too much of a stretch to read this scene as an allegory for a gay kid coming out of the closet.  This single exchange completely changes the context of the entire show, elevating it from just good to spectacular, and gives a whole new meaning to the theme song lyric, "We can be who we want to be."