Glücksbärchis Teil 2 – Jetzt im Abenteuerland (1986)

Glücksbärchis Teil 2 – Jetzt im Abenteuerland: Directed by Dale Schott. With Hadley Kay, Chris Wiggins, Cree Summer, Alyson Court. The Care Bears try to help a young girl at summer camp who, in an effort to revamp her dorky social status to agility and skill, enters into a sinister bargain with a shape-shifting demon posing as a young boy.

“Years from now, when the kids who went (or were taken) to see the likes of u0026quot;Shrek,u0026quot; u0026quot;The Lion Kingu0026quot; and anything from Pixar hit their twenties or older, theyu0026#39;ll be horrified to see the sort of bilge that passed for feature cartoons in the 1980s. (Heck, Iu0026#39;m 33 and Iu0026#39;m horrified NOW!) Theyu0026#39;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 canu0026#39;t blame them.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eu0026quot;Care Bears Movie II: A New Generationu0026quot; capsulises all that was bad about the Neon Decadeu0026#39;s cartoons – unabashed commercialisation, animation that isnu0026#39;t even as good as Disneyu0026#39;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 Nelvanau0026#39;s answer to Hanna-Barberau0026#39;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 canu0026#39;t follow the plot), and music – both the songs by Dean u0026amp; Carol Parks and the score by Patricia Cullen – that makes your average Don Bluth movieu0026#39;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.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI could have been watching u0026quot;Kim Possibleu0026quot; instead of writing this, you know.”