THE CARE BEARS MOVIE: Nobody Cares Like a Bear

The Care Bears Movie (1985) – Directed by Arna Selznick – Starring Mickey Rooney, Jackie Burroughs, Georgia Engel, Sunny Besen Thrasher, Billie Mae Richards, Hadley Kay, Dan Hennessey, Marla Lukofsky, Cree Summer, Jayne Eastwood, and Harry Dean Stanton.

There are three highly interesting facts about THE CARE BEARS MOVIE to me.

The first is that Billie Mae Richards plays Tenderheart Bear. Who’s Billie Mae Richards? She’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

The second is that they paid for Harry Dean Stanton to be the singing voice of Brave Heart Lion, but not the talking voice of Brave Heart Lion. Why? I have no idea. It’s not like – with all due respect to the great Mr. Stanton – that one hears his singing voice and thinks, “Yes!” and hears his talking voice and think, “No!”

The third is that Carole King wrote and sings the the movie’s theme song, called “Care-a-lot.” It seems pretty clear that “Care-a-lot” was written for THE CARE BEARS MOVIE and was not, as you might wonder, a leftover from the Tapestry sessions. So whatever one thinks of the story (it’s a bit vanilla) and music here (and the songs by King and John Sebastian are mostly bland sing-a-longs), there is some quality talent involved here. There’s also a nice sense of respecting the animated specials of yesteryear, with the use of both Ricahrds and Mickey Rooney (who often played Santa Claus in the Rankin-Bass specials), and the incredibly simple style of storytelling.

Like the Rankin-Bass specials, TCBM isn’t here to dazzle you with a high degree of literary proficiency; it’s here to give your kids something bright and colorful to watch while they get some kind of bland (potentially skewed) lesson on morality.

In TCBM, the moral lesson of the day is that it’s okay to care, that you shouldn’t shut out all people because some people were mean to you.

TCBM is presented as a story told by Mr. Cherrywood, an old man who runs an orphanage with his wife. The kids are up late but want a story, so he tells them the tale of a brother and sister, Kim and Jason, who are cold and bitter because their parents left them and no one will adopt them from the orphanage. Friend Bear and Secret Bear go looking for kids to help and they run across two kids who want nothing to do with them. All four of them get accidentally teleported back to Care-a-lot when the Care Bears new teleportation unit goes online. The kids are like, “Friends are stupid,” but then all the Care Bears sing a song and the kids are like, “We like to have friends!”

Movie over?

Not quite.

Tenderheart has gone to Earth and runs across Nicholas, a magician’s apprentice to the Great Fettucini. (And no, his apprentice name isn’t “Alfredo,” though it would be awesome if it was.) Nicholas doesn’t have any friends in the whole world, but would do anything to have one. (See what they did with Kim and Jason there?) That’s when he meets an old magic book with an evil Spirit inside who seduces him into performing all kinds of bad magic that sucks the caring out of the world.

That’s bad news for Care-a-lot because the place runs on human caring. (What? How? Why? That’s three questions too many for this film.) This means the Care Bears can’t teleport Jason and Kim home, so they have to go on a grand adventure to both get the kids home and save the world from the Spirit. Along the way they meet the Care Bear Cousins, other animals that can be conveniently packaged and sold to kids as stuffed animals.

Which, again, if you’re new here, I don’t think is a problem. Kids like toys. Toys foster imagination. Would the Care Bear toys be okay if there wasn’t a movie? Would the movie be okay if there wasn’t toys? If you said yes to either, that’s a dumb answer.

And this is the way the film goes, with plenty of Spirit vs. Care Bear and Care Bear Cousin fights in wacky locations, and then they get to Earth and rescue Nicholas and restore the world’s ability to care.

It’s really not a horrible movie, all things considered. The family owned copies of this movie and its sequel for my baby sister, and I ended up watching it a few times and never hated it. Simplistic movie that it is, THE CARE BEARS MOVIE is bright, uplifting, and has a decent amount of thrills and action. It’s a well-meaning film about allowing yourself to care about other people, and even if the message of the Care Bears (like the Smurfs and the Seven Dwarfs) is that you are defined by your most notable characteristic. The message for kids, though, is that these caring bears are there to help; importantly, for all the brilliance of the Care Bear Stare (when the powers embodied in the Care Bears shoot out of the designs on their tummies), it’s Jason and Kim who end up getting Nicholas to realize the error of his ways. Secret Bear helps with the final defeat on the Spirit, but it’s the kids themselves who turn the tide of this final confrontation, and I do think that sends a positive message to kids that even if there are people to care about you in your life, it’s still up to you to do things for yourself. Just because someone cares about you doesn’t mean they’re going to do everything for you.

Sometimes, you’ve got to help yourself and care about yourself.

And if buying a green and white, stuffed animal bear with a four leaf clover on its chest helps remind kids of that lesson, I’m not going to begrudge a greeting card company from making a little cake off it.