In a Twitter thread, Atomic Cartoons CG animator SnookumsGal (Karmyn Chretien), who worked on My Little Pony: Make Your Mark, has explained a longstanding curiosity: where did Jazz Hooves's ears go?
Firstly, both of those gifs are of shots that I animated, so shoutout to the Derpibooru community for making those gifs!
There’s been no doubt that many fans and viewers of the show have noticed that a certain teal pony had ears in a couple of shots at the beginning of MYM, and never again. I’m here as someone who worked on the show to give my understanding as to why this is!
Like most other ponies in the show, Jazz’s model was worked off of a base Earth Pony rig, and her hair/mane was added by the modelling/groom artists afterwards. She had gone through a round of concept art and design before her final look was decided.
In the original concept art, her hair was designed to be a bit more voluminous, implying her ears were covered up. However, the translation to 3D wasn’t as simple, and her hair isn’t as poofy. The way her hair is parted in the model, it didn’t leave any “holes” for the ears
So while this looks more or less fine when viewing her from the front of her model, from the sides, you can blatantly see that they clip/crash through her hair strands.
At some point soon after we had started finishing up the first MYM Special, the client and directors agreed that they didn’t like the look of this, in addition, they wanted her final model to look like the concept art, which didn’t include her ears.
So going forward, it was a conscious decision that the modelling team would remove her ears from her animation rig. It would take time and resources to redo the hair and kept her ears, plus this character had already been approved by the client.
So essentially, TL;DR:
Jazz’s ears not showing up in the show is not an animation error or mistake, it was a decision to better match her model to the concept art that had been approved by the client!
All this being said, that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to have headcanons or in-universe reasons as to why her ears don’t show up! If you want to see it as her being a character that represents disabilities or anything else, I think that’s awesome!
But yeah, that’s just the technical behind-the-scenes reasoning why Jazz’s ears don’t show up in MYM. I hope I brought some insight to the topic!
Update: SnookumsGal also shared an addendum the next day (June 9) to emphasize the limitations of her perspective.
I just wanted to reiterate that this is also my personal understanding of this topic and is ultimately subjective! This thread may not be 100% accurate as I have only played one small part of a massive production, and there may be more to this topic that I have not been privy to.
Twitter: @_overcast07
