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EQG's character design is bad. (edit : I think-)


Sepul-Coloratura

Which Twilight do I prefer (the picture below↓)  

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  1. 1. Which Twilight do I prefer (the picture below↓)

    • The first one
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    • The second one
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    • I don't see the difference
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Equestria-Girls-Digital-Series-Twilight-Sparkle-official-artwork-my-little-pony-equestria-girls-the-digital-series-41173396-1030-1546.thumb.png.258a52602ed3a4aff8749a979e50e632.pngEquestria-Girls-Digital-Series-Twilight-Sparkle-official-artwork-my-little-pony-equestria-girls-the-digital-series-41173396-1030-1546(2).thumb.png.756f419f82acecf634762c186e0fd752.png

One of the biggest issues when me and probably many people first watched the EQG was the character designs. Now I'm used to it and I care more about the characters itself, but I still think the character design isn't optimal. The head gone too big to the point that is dehumanizing, the torso is too small compared to all other body parts, making the limbs feel awkwardly thin and long like a stick insect. (and in the early movies and shorts, characters had that awkward 2-D movement contributed to that factor) (maybe they were trying to empathize the part where Twilight being awkward to be a human, but the first thing you shouldn't do for the re-introduction of a franchises main character is to make them feel instinctively alien to the audience's eyes and brains.)

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The big shiny eyes were the key factor that made ponies cute especially in Gen 4, but in this case, they are slightly dipping their toes into the uncanny valley. (many badly drawn anime girls are notorious of this same issue.) Some male characters are so atrocious (sorry to use such a strong expression, but it's true) to the part that is hilarious and out-of-place like Bulk Biceps. I'd say it is not translated well.

1754149.png.a8bce250e83aff1c7b38e3f7b3719993.pngEquestria_Girls_Principal_Celestia_artwork.png.a8f3a52c844b73b09e9791919d311ad5.png1437b15a9cd5e60aad3ae0c67441296b.thumb.png.e73be131ec5c7d261684a81ec69e50c2.png

Lots of characters including Celestia and Luna looks wired and awkward, sort of eerie vibe that I could only explain right now by comparing it to a blackface actors from the 19th century. And Celestia looks exactly like a Pharaoh's mask from ancient Egypt. Oh, and even all the character's fashion choices were ugly too. There are many fan drawing and vector images out there that made the characters look so much better while yet keeping the original pony character feeling.

Even the creators of EQG themselves made a better version of the characters and included in the first movie. I can't wrap my head around why they didn't make the rest of the franchise that the characters look like this.

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This is so much better. They feel much more like the original pony counterparts, they feel much more human, and they kept the juvenile and innocent nature of ponies. And most of all, even while their heads and eyes are huge, they don't look awful. It's not close to perfect, but why they didn't go with this design? They even got the clothes right. (I still don't know what's with all those huge boots.) Fortunately, the recent animations cleaned up some of these problems like clothing and movements, but it is still a half-fixed mess.

The other big part that bothers me is it isn't hard to make it look better! Look at what I did in 3 minutes, and they had all the time to do it in the studio!

Equestria-Girls-Digital-Series-Twilight-Sparkle-official-artwork-my-little-pony-equestria-girls-the-digital-series-41173396-1030-1546.thumb.png.258a52602ed3a4aff8749a979e50e632.pngEquestria-Girls-Digital-Series-Twilight-Sparkle-official-artwork-my-little-pony-equestria-girls-the-digital-series-41173396-1030-1546(2).thumb.png.756f419f82acecf634762c186e0fd752.png(Don't look back to the first one after seeing the second one. It might hurt your brain.)

Body ratio and silhouettes are the first things to come when designing a character, and they didn't get the fundamental basics right. It's not like that they changed the design the last few hours from a better design because of the studio interference or something. (actually, the whole existence of EQG was a studio interference but) The first picture looks like she's gonna flip upside down due to the head's weight and swing back and forth like a roly-poly toy.

What do you think about the EQG human character design? What did you especially like or hate about it?

Edited by Sepul-Coloratura
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Finally, a thread I can agree on. My biggest reason for disliking Equestria Girls is the awful characters designs. While the MLP:FiM designs are adorable, the designs for Equestria girls make them look like bootleg barbies. Long legs, small bodies, and a large head.

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Well, I am not sure but big anime eyes, bubble heads and those long legs comes to mind  when I think of their body proportions. Their none existing flat chests used to be an issue but not so much right now.

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1 hour ago, cuteycindyhoney said:

"EQG's character design is bad"

 

This is a pet peeve of mine. Sorry, but not quite the way you might think.  You can not state an OPINION as fact.

 

I myself, find nothing wrong with the character design.

Well said. 

If you don't like Equestria Girls, that's a matter of opinion. But opinion is NOT fact.

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1 hour ago, cuteycindyhoney said:

"EQG's character design is bad"

 

This is a pet peeve of mine. Sorry, but not quite the way you might think.  You can not state an OPINION as fact.

 

I myself, find nothing wrong with the character design.

 

2 minutes ago, Will Guide said:

Well said. 

If you don't like Equestria Girls, that's a matter of opinion. But opinion is NOT fact.

Well, yeah. It's just me saying, just my opinion.

1 hour ago, Sparklefan1234 said:

The only character Equestria Girls character design I really dislike is Vignette Valencia.

Is there a specific reason for you to dislike her design than anyone else? Was it her hair? Clothing? Or all combined with her personality?

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58 minutes ago, R.D.Dash said:

Well, I am not sure but big anime eyes, bubble heads and those long legs comes to mind  when I think of their body proportions. Their none existing flat chests used to be an issue but not so much right now.

Why it was an issue? I think I can guess several reasons, but I don't even want to start that nonsense....

50 minutes ago, A.V. said:

sunset_shimmer__blush__by_diegator007_db

I don't have a problem with ^this^ -- no, siree. :mlp_bedeyes::wub:

I think Sunset has the best fashion choice of all seven main characters. And she wears something slightly more close to what a real person would.

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I’ve always found the character designs awful. Their legs are way too long, their outfits don’t make any sense and the proportions are all over the place. The focal point should be the head, but instead the shoses and skirts become more dominant. I feel like they tried to make a balance of human and cartoon human with pony elements - which failed. :sunny:

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32 minutes ago, Goat-kun said:

Pssst, Anon-san. Kotchi, kotchi 3Y6uKBJ.png

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I was aware of these figure series. I think this interpretation of ponies are more true to the characters. You can just look and them and easily guess what kind of character they are. And Japan is very good at character building based on archetypes. I believe there are several terms that is ridiculously specific, but describes most of the characters in the anime spectrum very well, which MLP also does. The shy one, the athlete, the bookworm, etc. I was surprised to listen their dubbed language in MLP flawlessly fit the characters. They have a very specific set of voice actresses who can play the specific archetypes.

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7 minutes ago, Sepul-Coloratura said:

Why it was an issue? I think I can guess several reasons, but I don't even want to start that nonsense

I thought it was just weird that nearly all of them had the same A, B-cup breasts, despite puberty, different genetics, and other factors that would make them more unique.

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6 minutes ago, Flutterstep said:

I’ve always found the character designs awful. Their legs are way too long, their outfits don’t make any sense and the proportions are all over the place. The focal point should be the head, but instead the shoses and skirts become more dominant. I feel like they tried to make a balance of human and cartoon human with pony elements - which failed. :sunny:

So by your theory, the reason for the studio making all those huge boots are to conjure up the sensibility of watching an original pony characters? That also explains the huge head.

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26 minutes ago, Sepul-Coloratura said:

Is there a specific reason for you to dislike her design than anyone else? Was it her hair? Clothing? Or all combined with her personality?

 

Sorry for not elaborating. Vignette Valencia's ugly personality made her look ugly to me, too. :eww:

 

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Character design has a purpose beyond 'looking real', these are cartoons we're talking about. Exaggerated physical features draw the attention of the viewer, it's as simple as that.

So, we must ask ourselves. Why are they trying to draw attention to their hair styles, clothes, boots and faces?

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(edited)
15 minutes ago, R.D.Dash said:

I thought it was just weird that nearly all of them had the same A, B-cup breasts, despite puberty, different genetics, and other factors that would make them more unique.

I think we would all quite agree on which pony has the biggest breasts to the smallest breasts, which we might shouldn't. But that idea of breast sizes would have been blocked out in the meeting room, I suppose.

9 minutes ago, Sparklefan1234 said:

 

Sorry for not elaborating. Vignette Valencia's ugly personality made her look ugly to me, too. :eww:

 

I agree. But I could say that means It's also a good design because it succeeds on what it tries to accomplish; make us hate her.

Edited by Sepul-Coloratura
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Character designs are something that will always cause a division. Some people will like them while others won't with everyone else being in the middle where they don't particularly care so long as they enjoy what they're watching. Me? I did find the designs awkward at first but I attribute that to the animators not being familiar with them. They have improved immensely over time so now I appreciate such designs. Not all of them are winners but I can also appreciate experimentation even when it doesn't quite work out as intended.

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6 minutes ago, DonMaguz said:

Character design has a purpose beyond 'looking real', these are cartoons we're talking about. Exaggerated physical features draw the attention of the viewer, it's as simple as that.

So, we must ask ourselves. Why are they trying to draw attention to their hair styles, clothes, boots and faces?

It's a good point. But my complaint wasn't about them being not realistic.

As I mentioned, those same characteristics you said comes from the young versions of human mane six as well. And they look just fine to me. So it is important to see not only what method they are using to accomplish their goal, but also how they nail them.

I'm guessing those features are to make the characters look young, attractive, feminine, cute and vibrant. On the design of the young mane six, those features succeeds to reach the goal, relatively speaking, and also looks more balanced and generally pretty. But I'd say the same features doesn't work on the original EQG grown-up character designs. They don't bring up the positive impressions, they don't look balanced when put together, they look less pretty a.k.a. ugly.

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(edited)
20 minutes ago, Ganondorf8 said:

Character designs are something that will always cause a division. Some people will like them while others won't with everyone else being in the middle where they don't particularly care so long as they enjoy what they're watching. Me? I did find the designs awkward at first but I attribute that to the animators not being familiar with them. They have improved immensely over time so now I appreciate such designs. Not all of them are winners but I can also appreciate experimentation even when it doesn't quite work out as intended.

It's a fair point. But also, they had a quite clear consumer group : the people watching MLP. That's an advantage.(or a disadvantage because the pony design was a high standard to live up to. maybe they shouldn't have made it at all) And the character design of EQG resembles the MLP ponies in a wrong way. That's why I mentioned body ratio. A relatively more fair standards. If it was slightly adjusted, which I did, if the heads were quite big but not that extreme, it would have been easier for me to like. Like I said, the part bothered me the most is how little changes made such a difference. I wouldn't say I'm definitely right because the body ratio could be a matter of taste, but I'm quite positive about the fixed version of Twilight is better than the original. I think I have to make a poll.

Edited by Sepul-Coloratura
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Frankly, I will never get complaints (or is it arguments ?) such as this. So long as the story is great the artwork is a distant issue to the point that it would have to be like deliberately bad for it to be an issue. 

Further a la art of the dress I have come to believe the consumer rarely has any idea of what good artwork is. Most often people will complain " its too different " but then when they are given what they wanted just a year ago in a new season or whatever what do we hear? "It's just a copy of the old stuff whats the point this is unoriginal " 

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(edited)
16 minutes ago, Jedishy said:

Frankly, I will never get complaints (or is it arguments ?) such as this. So long as the story is great the artwork is a distant issue to the point that it would have to be like deliberately bad for it to be an issue. 

Further a la art of the dress I have come to believe the consumer rarely has any idea of what good artwork is. Most often people will complain " its too different " but then when they are given what they wanted just a year ago in a new season or whatever what do we hear? "It's just a copy of the old stuff whats the point this is unoriginal " 

I already can picture people's reaction on G5.

Well. For me, it was on a level of being deliberately bad. And also, character design is essential to the MLP franchise. One of the reasons that FiM was successful in the first place was because of the character designs. Hell, not only MLP, but all the cartoon TV shows. It's a very visual medium with vibrant color with a character based story / character based market.

And also people do complain all the time. Everyone has an opinion. The right thing to do is sort out the legitimate complains and listen to them. "It all a matter of perspective." or "haters gonna hate." attitude is sometimes useful, but it only good at avoiding the question, which it's sometimes necessary. I do respect the opinions on people liking the character design. This was about why I thought the design wasn't good. At least I was trying to be reasonable.

Edited by Sepul-Coloratura
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3 hours ago, cuteycindyhoney said:

This is a pet peeve of mine. Sorry, but not quite the way you might think.  You can not state an OPINION as fact.

 

I agree pretty heavily with this sentence. You framed the topic as objective rather than subjective.

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I honestly don’t really like Equestria Girls, but probably not for the reason you’re thinking... The reason I don’t like is simply this: I CAN’T FRIGGIN DRAW THEM 

Call me crazy, or untalented if you will, but I’ve tried and tried and tried! Nothing works, maybe it’s just my style of drawing humans that won’t let it work though? Because the proportions are all messed up?

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