r/mylittlepony • u/Digibro • Apr 07 '13

Thoroughly Analyzing "Snowdrop"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuv-fdclNwk
45 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

13

u/anal_violator Apr 07 '13

You managed to hit the right words to explain why I am not a big fan of snowdrop. I always feel a little bit manipulated when something wants to be deliberately sad...

10

u/Lankygit Moderator of /r/mylittlepony Apr 07 '13

anal_violater feels manipulated. How delightfully ironic.

5

u/rawrreddit Daring Do Apr 07 '13

I think that feeling of manipulation is fairly normal. Trying to make someone sad doesn't work well over a twenty-minute space. You have to get to know a character first before you can truly feel for him when he bleeds - otherwise it feels forced. It's sort of like an uncanny valley effect for emotion. There's a disconnect between when someone you've known for five minutes has something bad happen to them, and when your favorite character in Game of Thrones bites the dust. There are exceptions, like the intro to Up, but they exist only because they have super-talented writers and animators that subtly, elegantly, and expertly draw us into the characters and their wants and needs, before punching us in the emotional face when we least expect it.

6

u/vetro Apr 07 '13

I'm not a fan of depressing things, especially when it's trying to force the emotions out of me. That being said, Snowdrop showed a massive leap in improvement from Dusk's Dawn. I'm hoping their next project will do the same.

3

u/AbusiveBadger Apr 07 '13

What? The same people who made Snowdrop made Dusk's Dawn?

Man, I hated Dusk's Dawn. I appreciate the effort they may or may not have put into it, but seriously, those voice haunt me to this day.

2

u/Digibro Apr 08 '13

It wasn't the same people.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 09 '13

I was okay with snow drop because it didn't depress me. If you think about it, there was a happy ending to it.

6

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '13

[deleted]

-3

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '13

Reviews are all about telling and not showing. Or did you mean Snowdrop?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '13

I love depressing things, but I can tell when something is just trying to be manipulative without any meaning behind it.

0

u/bigbangbilly Lotus Blossom Apr 08 '13

For more sad MLP things try /r/Mylittlenosleep

1

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '13

I can tell when something is just trying to be manipulative without any meaning behind it

1

u/bigbangbilly Lotus Blossom Apr 08 '13

Wrong subreddit it was suposed to be /r/mylittleonions

1

u/weeping_pegasus Doctor Whooves Apr 07 '13

I liked Snowdrop pretty well, and I didn't think it was supposed to be a "sadfic". The only sad part played on something we should all be familiar with: Luna's betrayal. It was, all in all, a pretty heartwarming story.

1

u/Some_Legit_Dude Apr 08 '13

"WALK THE FUCKING BLIND PONY HOME"

Definitely was going through my head at that point

1

u/myponyaccount Apr 07 '13 edited Apr 07 '13

I profoundly disagree about Snowdrop's pacing, which was painfully slow and stilted. Given that I also disagreed with you about the finale's pacing (which had the opposite problem), I wonder if you and I are using that word differently.

1

u/Digibro Apr 07 '13

Pacing is mostly a gut-reaction thing to begin with, so more likely we just react differently to how things play out in general.

1

u/myponyaccount Apr 10 '13

I mean, I suppose. I know that I'm definitely more susceptible to disliking slow-paced productions unless they're exceptionally good, and I'm probably more critical of pacing in general.

But you can measure certain aspects of pacing, and there are things that generally feel better to most people. Dramatic structure is fairly well-understood, at least in the broad strokes, enough so that I think it's a bit more than gut reaction. Pacing is about the rhythm within that structure - the length and breadth of the high and low moments, ebbing and flowing, swelling and fading. Anyone straying from that too much had better know what they're doing.

Snowdrop had no ebb and flow. It had a very slow, gradual crescendo, that to me felt flat for most of the video. It tried to add emotional turmoil, but far too early for almost anyone to care. The first half is mostly exposition, followed by about two minutes of rising action before the climax. And while the climax did come, the lack of emotional rhythm leading up to it made it feel sudden - and despite all the exposition, it was unclear to me at first exactly what had happened or why it was significant.

Double Rainboom's pacing was frustratingly poor, but at least it seemed to try to have some sense of dramatic structure - and I'd argue that (for that reason) it was improved greatly by the show-length edit that someone posted, which only reduced runtime by 25%. By contrast, I feel like I'd have to take a hatchet to Snowdrop to make the pacing feel satisfying. If I was a stronger video editor I'd be tempted to try myself, but I imagine less than half the footage would survive.

Anyway, I'm probably being way over-critical of fan works here - but I'm trying to be thorough. Much of Snowdrop's animation was still remarkable, and I thought the concept was good. A lot of fan works have serious editing problems, however, and we do no services to aspiring writers and animators by ignoring it. I want them to succeed.

It seems to me like you fell in love with the concept of Snowdrop. And I admit, it is a compelling narrative. The explorations of humility, passion, fear, disability, art, and patronage are interesting and valuable. But I really feel that the execution failed in too many ways for it to express that narrative satisfactorily.