Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony
IMDb; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: none that I know of

As the title suggests, this documentary is about "bronies," who are teenage and adult fans of the animated TV series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (and yes, I do consider myself a brony). I first heard about the documentary in May of 2012, in an online clip featuring John de Lancie (who voiced the villain Discord in a few eps; the character was actually partly inspired by de Lancie's character Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation). The film was released for download in January 2013 (see the official site). Before I actually saw it, I saw a musical animated lecture about bronies, featuring the voices of de Lancie and Tara Strong (who plays Twilight Sparkle in the show, but an original pony here; de Lancie also plays an original pony). The animation also appears in the actual documentary, but broken up into several segments scattered throughout it. I think it works better as a whole, so you may want to click that link and watch it on YouTube, whether you also watch the documentary or not. Anyway, I finally watched the documentary in February (right after watching the third season finale).

It was originally meant to be about a convention called BroynCon, but the kickstarter campaign for the documentary raised a lot more money than expected, and the project became larger. It turned out to be about MLP:FIM fandom in general, rather than just one con (in fact it shows two other conventions as well as BronyCon). It also features some of the people involved in making the show, including series creator Lauren Faust, as well as de Lancie and Strong, and... people whose names I don't know. And while it gave a sense of how many bronies there are around the world, it focused mainly on several fans... a few from different areas of the U.S., some from Germany, some from the U.K., one from Israel. The documentary also shows how involved many fans are in creating various types of art inspired by the show, including original music and remixes of songs from the show, and all kinds of visual art, etc. There were stories about how intolerant a lot of people are of bronies (something luckily I've never had to deal with). The underlying theme of the documentary is basically that there's nothing wrong with anyone appreciating the message of the show, regardless of age or gender. The show provides very good messages about friendship and just generally how to behave as human beings, messages aimed at children, but often forgotten by adults. Of course, on top of that, it's just a really cute and fun and funny and cleverly written show with great characters.

It was fun for me, as a brony, to watch the film, even if it did make me a bit disappointed that I'll probably never be able to go to a convention (but then, I have plenty of experience being disappointed that I can't go to cons for any of my other fandoms). And it makes me feel remiss in not having actually made any pony fanart, myself (though I do intend to someday probably make a PMV, pony music video). Anyway, it's nice to know I'm not the only adult male fan of the show, though of course I already knew that. I'm not sure if the film would make any non-bronies more accepting of the fandom, but I still think it's pretty cool that the film even got made. And... I don't really know what else to say. Oh, except there are several really good brony-related songs playing over the end credits.

In 2014, there's a forthcoming unrelated documentary about bronies, A Brony Tale. I'm not sure if I'll see that, and I'm not sure a second doc is really necessary, but... we'll see.