@mjangelvortex  
Should do fine as long as they actually market it

@northern haste  
I heard. I hope it ends up being a success so more studios can get back to making more traditionally animated films.

@mjangelvortex  
Don bluth is working on a dragon’s lair movie no idea if it will be released in theatres though

@Background Pony #2369  
I’d love it if more animated films did something like that. The anniversary edition of Beauty and the Beast did something kind of similar (because Disney actually showed off the reel with storyboards and unfinished animation when the movie was still in production to an early audience).

Can someone release the full animation reel version of the movie now please?!

@Background Pony #8FBD  
There’s more of these? I’d love to see them.

Can you upload the rest?

@acesential  
I agree. I hope so too because I’d love to see 2D animation make a big comeback, especially with movies.

@mjangelvortex  
My hope that in the long term, the animation industry can look back at the MLP movie to show that 2D puppet animation is a viable way to do 2D animated movies without bearing the expense of a traditionally animated production. It’s a shame that movie producers consider traditional animation to be unprofitable. While 2D puppet animation isn’t quite the same, it’s still nice to have 2D characters up on the big screen again. Here’s hoping more people take notice and will try the technology themselves.

@acesential  
That sounds about right. Traditionally animated films go through a similar process.

@mjangelvortex  
If you want the typical breakdown- from my understanding, it generally goes:
 
Scripting -> storyboards -> animatic/slugging -> layouts (2D backgrounds/3D positioning)-> keyframing -> in-betweening -> special effects -> Clean up.

@acesential  
Oh. I didn’t know that the bottom right was the storyboard/animatic. Thanks for clearing that up.
 
@Hawkx1  
That might have been a deliberate choice since they might have gotten in the way of Pinkie’s face. I think they were a bit more concerned about getting the emotions out. But that’s just me guessing.

They forgot Twilight’s wings in the storyboard

@mjangelvortex
 
Oh, the bottom right? That’s the storyboard/animatic. The 3D layout was a step between the storyboards/animatics and key animation for the sake of shot placement, due to the use of 3D backgrounds in conjunction with 2D puppet animation.

@Masem  
I forgot that they used 3D storyboards/animatics. I think what they did here might be similar to what the animators in Steven Universe did where the animators may have drawn over the storyboards when animating.
 
@acesential  
True. Toon Boom can use puppets too. But the bottom right looks drawn. People draw with Flash as well despite it often using puppet animation. Lullaby for a Princess was animated this way. Warpout didn’t use puppets when animating that but instead drew the animation using Flash.

@mjangelvortex  
Toon Boom is still animated puppets- it just allows for significantly more sophisticated animated puppets than what’s usually possible with Flash.

@mjangelvortex  
There’s a step not shown but you can see where it would fit in, in that one they storyboarded, they roughed out the characters in 3D models, eg
 

 
and then used Toon Boom to drop that down to 2D. What it looks like they did further is keep mane/tail animations out of that process and did those more manually as a final step.

Unlike the show which uses puppets to animate the characters in Flash, the movie used Toon Boom and from what it looks like here the characters were animated by being drawn. I guess that explains why the movie felt like it was traditionally animated at times.