Years from now, when the kids who went (or were taken) to see the likes of "Shrek," "The Lion King" and anything from Pixar hit their twenties or older, they'll be horrified to see the sort of bilge that passed for feature cartoons in the 1980s. (Heck, I'm 33 and I'm horrified NOW!) They'll also be appalled to realise that that greeting-card toy creation the Care Bears were popular enough to have numerous animated TV specials, a TV show, and no less than three movies - and I certainly can't blame them.
"Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation" capsulises all that was bad about the Neon Decade's cartoons - unabashed commercialisation, animation that isn't even as good as Disney's TV cartoons of the time (surprisingly, it took the House of Mouse until the mid-1980s to take the plunge into tele-cartooning), incredibly bad writing from Nelvana's answer to Hanna-Barbera's Glenn Leopold, Peter Sauder (everybody here moralises and/or lectures rather than talks, and the Great Wishing Star is supposed to be the narrator but serves more to tell the story for anyone who really can't follow the plot), and music - both the songs by Dean & Carol Parks and the score by Patricia Cullen - that makes your average Don Bluth movie's backing seem like Danny Elfman on peak form. Throw in a lot of indigestible sentimentality, an incessantly condescending air, and an inescapable feeling that no one behind this meant a word of it, and you have a non-violent form of child abuse.
I could have been watching "Kim Possible" instead of writing this, you know.