The rule in G5, like with the previous generations that remains unbroken, is ponies have cutie marks on one side only. It can’t be possible on G5 for ponies having cutie marks on two sides, unless there is animation error at some point.

@Enmity1498
Hasbro never put out any toys with both cutie marks, but there have been tons of licensed toys with both.

@Fwelin
Correct, I’ve studied and learnt this, 3d is much easier to animate.

@Enmity1498
You have that backwards; in this case, it’s the 2D animations that is more challenging than CG.

CG models are harder to build and get to look good than 2D ones, but once they’re finished, it’s easier to manipulate them into most poses and motions because you’re just manipulating the model in 3D space instead of having to partially redraw or join together countless flash assets for each new pose or motion. If they had the flash models only have cutie marks on one side, they’d have to basically double all of the assets because now ponies that are facing left and facing right look different (they started doing that more often in later seasons anyway for stuff like manes, but it wasn’t common early on). In contrast, using CG models, they can just turn the model around and the cutie mark is automatically handled.

@Enmity1498
Except, in this case, one-sided cutie marks would have been more work in 2D, but were simple to do in 3D.

@Enmity1498
So we’re drawing them wrong all this time???? 😱😱😱

@Alexia
Yeah, good point. CG animation has a lot of challenges that 2D animation simply doesn’t have, especially when it comes to adding details like that (and frankly it likely won’t be the only difference we see in G5 due to the change in animation, which I personally don’t mind).

@Enmity1498
Lot easier to simply flip the animation as well, so cutie marks being on two sides for 2D was simply easier

One thing that people fail to see: the G4 toys only ever had one cutie mark for all of the ponies. Hasbro never made anything with two cutie marks on them. With that in consideration, the G5 ponies are actually more accurate to Hasbro’s toy like by having only one cutie mark rather than two.

@Phoenixflambe
Ponies can have a certain cutie mark but participate in other activities or have other occupations.

@Wayneponeth
Like Sprout, clearly dictatorship is his talent rather than that beet thing.

Hope g5 series will have a episode to settle this case.

Its one sided and the other gripe i have is that cutie marks aren’t popping as much. Most of the time i even gorgot they had one.

I don’t think that the single cutie mark thing has any “in-universe” reasons, like “it’s because there’s no magic”.  That was just a real-life design choice to bring the animated characters more in line with the actual toys.

They couldn’t do it in Gen4, because the two sides of the ponies were just the exact same Flash puppet, just mirrored as needed, so having the cutie mark only on one side would have made tons of extra work for the animators and would have inevitably led to frequent mistakes, like cutie-mark-less ponies, or ones with two of them. But now that the 3D ponies had two distinct sides they could do it, and did.

I get the feeling that it’s a design decision more than anything significant, and while I agree with the contention that they should be on both sides, I’m not going to lose sleep over it either. Unless g5 is going to make a big deal over them like g4 did, I won’t either.

The poners in the show are designed to look like the toys as much as humanly possible so my theory is that they left the cutie mark one sided just to save on toy manufacturing costs

less paint = cheaper per unit which adds up when you are creating thousands of brushable ponies???

Honestly Cutie Marks never seem to have been mentioned and talked about at all, and some of the Cutie Marks don’t really fit a pony’s talent. I wonder if Cutie Marks just lost all powers after magic was gone.

I know this has always been the case for the toys. Are there any staff members we could ask about this?

Perhaps to differetiate from G4 where pwnies had two because of the animation style. With this 3D one, everything has more dimentions. Well, one more.

I guess they’ve been without magic too long.

Maybe they’ll be back in a few generations.

@neo4812
Not sure why they changed to that, but I personally don’t like this idea. For example if you want to draw a group shot, it will be a little wired because ponies on some direction there’s no cutie mark. Like this one:

i noticed that too. guess its just a thing in g5