This is kind of a tough one to answer. We’ve found a way to make it work, like we usually do, but that’s ultimately gonna have to be something you’ll need to see for yourself.

Another thing, we actually still don’t know the real reason as to why Celestia needed to reform Discord. That has yet to be explained in the show itself and we don’t know if it ever will. The way that I interpret it is that Celestia is a character who is more forgiving than most. In the episode “Keep Calm and Flutter On”, Celestia states that she believes that Discord has to be reformed of his own free will so that he might use his magic for good.

That basically means that Celestia doesn’t want to change who Discord is out of force probably because she knows that she CAN’T. We can absolutely portray that in the movie and maybe in some cases, you might see a hint of that. In terms of the film, we toned down a bit of Discord’s badness so that it isn’t out of balance with the show’s tone.

The tone of the movie is something I’m not worried about in the slightest as the new draft represents the show’s tone much better than it did before.

The movie takes a little bit more inspiration from some of the more classic Disney films as I’m not as partial to the Renaissance films as I am the films that were created when Walt was alive.

I grew up loving more things like Pinocchio and Fantasia rather some of the films you listed. Mostly because, as I stated before, those movies loved playing around with emotional simplicity and depth. They were flawed, but beautiful works of art. So I felt like giving the pony universe that type of feeling made the overall vision behind the piece a lot more complex and interesting to play around with.

Yes. We do have a lot of Group/Team Leaders to balance out directing so many people. All the Department/Team leaders host a meeting with me every week to get updates from all accounts so I’m still kept up to speed.

Every department including Art, Animation, and Post Production also get a meeting every other week to allow time for assignment review and progress updates with the crew members directly.

He won’t. Seeing as how the movie takes place in-between Seasons 2 and 3, its safe to say that he won’t. However, considering how at some point this movie was going in a completely different direction to stand out, I don’t feel guilty for spoiling that Discord was going to be defeated presumably for good at some point in one of the original drafts of the script. Mostly because it isn’t going to happen anymore.

Some members of the team told me to go ahead with it because we managed to write it in a way that made sense, but in the end, I just didn’t have it in me to go through with it. People are kinda upset at how I’m sort of portraying him in the movie already, I didn’t wanna cause more controversy.

Journey of the Spark has been in production since late 2011.