Depending upon where you stand on the subject, the documentary Bronies can be viewed either as a celebration of the fandom or a portrait of it presented for your mockery.
A “brony,” for those of you with better things to do with your time, is a male fan of the current cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, a show aimed at children, and primarily girls at that. The guys featured here don’t just like it — they live it, from collecting figurines and attending conventions to creating their own songs and immortalizing the characters on their car windows. (Perhaps “immortalizing” is too strong a word when the windows get busted by homophobes.)
Funded by Kickstarter and featuring Pony voice stars John de Lancie and Tara Strong, Bronies is not without interest to the viewer curious about ways of life that are alien to them. The level of fandom on display is as bewildering to me as suspending oneself by hooks in the nipples or surgically altering your face to resemble a celebrity; while I support one’s freedom to pursue such adventures, I do not get what compels one to take it to such an extreme. Hobbies are good; obsessions are unhealthy.
The kids of Bronies are likely to outgrow the phase as fast as a previous generation did Pokémon, but the adults … I mean, what good can come out of calling yourself Starlight Ironhoof? Something about that strikes me as deeply sad — an emotion with which the film does not intend to leave you. —Rod Lott