Reviews for The Care Bears Movie

This movie is jammed full of lollipop and gumdrops including a forest of feelings, a rainbow teleporter, and a fluffy cloud car. It is 100 cheese. But like the other review, I found the movie somehow much more palatable than it should be. The songs are corny, but catchy. The kids and bears are lame, but likeable. And even though the care bear cousins are an obvious attempt to double the number of care bear toys on the market, they are kinda cool (especially the speedy swift heart rabbit, the whistling cozy heart penguin, and the silly playful heart monkey. I do not really get how a care bear with a milk shake symbol can be any help in any situation though).

I guess its the movies innocence that makes it more enjoyable than a sell-out movie like Shrek 3 that goes for poop jokes and easy pop culture refs. Care bears has a bit of a timelessness to it. Still, like I said, its pretty cheesy and no masterpiece, but at least it doesnt offend.

After two rather cringe worthy specials came this. The only thing is while those specials are anything but special, this film is at least something I can stand watching and have done without feeling as though I completely wasted my time. Made on a shoestring budget by a (at the time) near bankrupt Nelvana, it’s a credit to them that it manages somehow to make me more likely to smile than grimace. This is one of those films I put on when I want to watch something that won’t tax my brain in any way, but which I’ll nevertheless enjoy just the same.

In some ways this was the one of the most important projects that the Canadian-based studio embarked upon. Although they had still gained a reputation for well made TV specials, they had managed to almost destroy themselves when their $8 million home grown feature Rock & Rule failed to find a strong distributor. This failure led the company to limp along making joint projects like Inspector Gadget with Dic and well paid stuff like Ewoks and Droids.

The Care Bears were at this point at the first high wave of their popularity, a new toy line was being established to accompany the bears; the Care Bear Cousins. The executives of American Greeting Corps. Had decided that a animated movie would be a good way of advertising the new products, Nelvana showed them a test film and happy with the result their decided to go ahead and the film went underway.

Perhaps it’s a reaction to the sordidness of the new phenomenon that is (supposed) mature entertainment like the South Parks and Family Guys of today’s television. Maybe it’s because the characters are just cute. Err, no, no to all the above; fact is that for some reason or another, this is a film that I enjoy despite the fact that I know it is technically terrible.

However the thing is that if this is garbage then it's better - much better - made garbage than what you would normally associate with merchandise-led motion pictures. For the animation of this kind you would expect terrible things, yet the animation is generally competent throughout, not amazing, but it mostly holds up. The backgrounds are all round good, though the ones for the fantasy worlds of Care-a-lot and The Forest of Feelings are better. Okay it’s never going to compete with Disney, Bluth or Dreamworks or the other big boys for quality, especially were character animation is concerned; but with $3 million this is decent stuff on the visual front.

Where the animation gets me down is the lapses in quality control, flashes of wrong color on the cels don’t do the film any favors, the other thing that bugs me is the occasionally continually error when characters end up appearing places that they are not. Most of these incidents last less than a second and I know that some people never knew that these problems existed. The other thing is the lack of character animation or at least of distinctively different characters; the only characters that show a spark of standing out from the crowd are the evil spirit herself and (very) occasionally Grumpy Bear.

Also only one of the songs are worth are merit and the rest are generally forgettable; that one song fortunately is the thing that starts and ends the movies (running through the credits) and is nicely melodic, opening up the life and motto of the bears with a strange symphonic gusto. Unlike the rest of the songs which are weak and some of the incidental music in both there construction and feel; much of it the same as you’d expect from this time period. The real oddity of the lot is the song at the ceremony at the end which turns into a sing-a-long; either Disney’s Sing-a-long tapes had already come out or Nelvana is taking a leaf out of the Song-Tunes of some of the Fleischer/Famous shorts.

Well what works? Strangely for a world full of cutesy characters who want to show everyone how to care this film is surprisingly free of sweet gooiness; in fact considering the supposed demographic targeted, this gets quite dark. It is generally a quest/journey film, in this case a race to get to Earth, to stop an evil spirit trapped in a book from ridding the world of all its feelings. For what reasons it is doing this are never fully explained and I suppose for the most part quite irrelevant.

For me, this book is either trying to possess Nicolas, or trying to free itself from it paper-filled prison; the later would fit with the key and lock that allows it to be opened in the first place. The spirit is a temptress, seducing Nicolas with tall tales of how her magic can help him get friends, but soon she constancy tries to suppress his humanity; all of what little positive feeling he had dismissed away at much the same rate as her power grows. In essence the film is about the seduction, fall and ultimate redemption of the main villain, this does make a nice change from those movies that insist on killing their villains.

Perhaps the strangest little plot-device in the film is the Care Bears Star-Trek like teleport device; called here as the Rainbow Rescue Beam, even using the same style of effect and sound. And like Star-Trek it’s main purpose seem to be to strand a group of characters away from the main group.

The journey through the Forest of Feelings in just a exercise in getting the cousins in as convenient a location to help at the most critical point as to when they’re needed as possible. Yet this is still preferable to the way that My Little Pony dealt with introducing its new characters. It may be a simple threadbare story, but it makes no pretense to be anything else and is happy to tell it in as straightforwardly as possible; some decent narration by Mickey Rooney helps a bit in that count. As such it is a film I’d happily choose to watch on a rainy day, or even a sunny one.

Even in spite of those problems I mentioned, I find myself quietly enjoying myself while watching this film; the reason is, I suppose, that it is ultimately fun if undemanding. It may have been the first film to bear that dreaded "Merchandise-led-animation" tag, it may have opened the floodgates for the horrors that followed; but something in me likes this, despite its many faults. Ultimately this may come down to some sort of nostalgia (although that didn’t help He-Man), yet when I watch this film I do not only get the feeling that the makers of the film did what they could with this movie's limitations of both time and money, but also that the people involved in its making enjoyed themselves.

History-note: This film was released the same year as Disney’s epic The Black Cauldron, a film that shows that you can fling immense amounts of money and talent at an elaborate project and still end up with something which somehow is worse than a 'lowly' effort as the Care Bears Movie IMHO.