Aren't Parents Great???: The Care Bears vs Death and Deadbeats (aka Dark Heart Saved From Drowning)

For a group of beings so dedicated to extolling the values of kindness and friendship, the Care Bears sure seem to have made a lot of enemies out there. A race of touchy-feely ursines who lived up in the clouds in the kingdom of Care-a-Lot and kept a watchful eye on the emotional well-being of the people below, the bears were introduced in 1982 for a line of greetings cards by American Greetings, and within three short years had elevated to the level of superstardom that merited a theatrical feature, courtesy of Canadian animation studio Nelvana. Today, that film has enduring notoriety as the harbinger for what is popularly perceived as the animation industry's darkest hour. A lot has been made of how the surprisingly strong box office of The Care Bears Movie in 1985 absolutely smashed that of Disney's offering for that year, the ill-fated and much-maligned The Black Cauldron, which is cited less as proof of the Care Bears' merits than as the definitive indicator of how Disney, once the reigning masters of the industry, had hit rock bottom in losing to the most unworthy of competition. Mark Whitehead, in The Pocket Essential: Animation, describes The Care Bears Movie as the very worst example of the animation medium, which I personally think is a bit harsh. (Then again, he also called Animaniacs a "cynical corporate monstrosity"  and thought the Creature Comforts adverts were promoting British Gas, so can we really trust his judgement?) Elsewhere, it was not at all uncommon for cartoons in the late 80s and early 90s, still reeling from the state of the industry just a few years prior, to take pot-shots at the Care Bears and their ilk in order to demonstrate that they were above this sickly sweet nonsense. For example, The Care Bears Movie and its successors received an utterly brutal (and hilarious) send up in the Rugrats episode "At The Movies", when Tommy and friends are taken to see a screening of "The Dummi Bears in The Land Without Smiles", an inanely saccharine pic about a group of strangely familiar cloud-dwelling ursines who shoot happy thoughts at the children down below. Which was positively affectionate compared to the bad hand dealt to Fluffy and Uranus, a pair of unsubtle Care Bears pastiches whose only function in Duckman: Private Dick/Family Man was to be violently murdered by the title character every week.

It's not so hard to comprehend why these sweet and non-threatening bears would prove such a ripe target for scorn and parody.  The Care Bears were the unmistakable product of the 1980s, a time when children's programming was dominated by covert commercials attempting to sell them unsightly junk, The Care Bears Movie being one of the first attempts to bring that insidious plush-shilling magic to the big screen (Rainbow Brite, Transformers, My Little Pony and G.I. Joe were all quick to follow in its footsteps). The specific raison d'être of The Care Bears Movie was to plug the Care Bear Cousins, a new line of spin-off toys enabling a variety of non-bear species, including lions, monkeys and rabbits, to get in on the fuzzy sentiments (no rats, though, which is blatant discrimination). The picture does little to disguise its merchandising motives - the entire second act consists of the Care Bears taking a detour in their mission purely so that they can be introduced to the Cousins on an individual basis (and even then, there are more new plushies to shill than the film has time for, so a few of the Cousins have to settle for afterthought status in the act's closing musical number). The Care Bears also came about at a time when the go-to formula for cartoons was to replicate Hanna-Barbera's take on Peyo's The Smurfs, meaning that we got a ton of shows about a community of cute fantastical creatures up against some hammy-ass villain who objected to their relentless preciousness (the villain being the character with whom anyone outside of the target demographic was most likely to identify). If you like your cartoons to be creator-driven and with a little bite, then the decade didn't have a massive amount to offer you.

So yes, I understand the cynicism. And yet, despite knowing and seeing all too clearly the odious commercial ploy at the cold beating heart of the franchise, these bears get no bile from me (or at least the original 80s Bears don't...I've got harsher words to say about their revival in the 2000s). Fact of the matter is, The Care Bears Movie is guaranteed a special place in my heart by virtue of it being the first movie I can remember seeing - on a VHS tape my family bought at Marks & Spencer. And to three-year-old me, this thing seemed like an absolute epic. Even today, when that opening song by Carole King starts up...I can't help it, it sends shivers down my spine for how vividly it's able to transport me to such an early time in my life. My own long-decayed childhood innocence is tied up in this picture, so revisiting it is always a sad and haunting experience for me. The film's first sequel, Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation (1986), doesn't hold quite the same degree of personal nostalgia (I saw it a couple of times as a child, but at an older age, when my interests had largely moved on from the Care Bears), but I still kind of love that one on the grounds that it's such a delirious guilty pleasure. There was one other theatrical Care Bears feature made by Nelvana, The Care Bears Adventure In Wonderland (1987), but that one was not a part of my childhood - I was in my 20s by the time I saw it, and the only detail I remember at all is how thoroughly disturbed I was when I noticed that Grumpy Bear's bathroom had no toilet.

I got to thinking about The Care Bears Movie and Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation after that piece I wrote about the absence of traditional parental figures in Oliver & Company, because it seems to me that many of the exact same issues apply here. The paradox, in the case of The Care Bears Movie, is that one of the final morals, as articulated by a character in the penultimate scene, is "Aren't parents great?", yet the film as a whole seems curiously devoid of evidence as such, much as it is curiously devoid of parental figures, period. There are actually only three adult humans with speaking roles in the entire movie, two of whom are confined to the opening and closing bookends, while the other spends the majority of the narrative in a magic-induced coma. A New Generation, meanwhile, has no such characters at all - its narrative universe is populated entirely by children, Care Bears and the odd shape-shifting incubus. This absence of adults is seldom directly commented on, but there is something implicitly haunting about the scenario; in both pictures, children are imperilled by entities who specifically latch onto and manipulate their lonely despair while the adults aren't watching, either because that oversight is unavailable, or because the adults in this world simply don't care, and it falls upon the Care Bears to pick up the slack. And while the films reinforce the necessity of that oversight, in teaching children to distinguish between right and wrong and supporting them through adversity (even when such vital duties are being fulfilled by the Care Bears in the parents' stead), overall I'm inclined to see them as dealing with the realisation, still incipient in the target demographic, that such surveillance could well be fallible - there's a bigger world out there and sooner or later they're going to be pushed out into it.

First, though, a short note about Care Bear genders: with a few scant exceptions where the gender is entirely evident (eg: Grumpy Bear, Grams Bear and Brave Heart Lion) or where pronouns are helpfully dropped (eg: Wish Bear, Bedtime Bear and Playful Heart Monkey) most of the Care Bears/Care Bear Cousins are androgynous. The overwhelming majority of them are clearly voiced by female voice actors, but I would hesitate to make the call as to whether the characters are meant to be male or female. Take the nasally-sounding Friend Bear, for example - growing up, I always assumed they were female, but nowadays I'm 50/50 on the matter. My preliminary research also indicates that there isn't actually a whole lot of consistency regarding Care Bear genders across the different incarnations anyway; Funshine Bear, for one, has regularly alternated between male and female according to the whims of each individual writer. So unless I'm 100% certain, I'm largely going to avoid referring to individual Care Bears with gender-specific pronouns.

The Care Bears Movie opens in a world that, at first glance, appears to have little to do with those candy-coloured ursines living up in the clouds. Instead, we find ourselves in a foster home down on Earth, where a man named Mr Cherrywood (voice of Mickey Rooney, the most high-profile name in the film's casting) is tucking in his charges for the night and, on their request, regales them with a story they've clearly heard on multiple evenings prior, about the Care Bears and how they saved a bunch of wayward children from succumbing to the forces of despair. Two bears, Friend Bear (Eva Almos) and Secret Bear (Anni Evans), have travelled down to Earth to meet a pair of young siblings, Kim (Cree Summer) and Jason (Sunny Bensen Thrasher), who've closed off their hearts as a self-protective measure after losing their parents, and try to convince them that there is still plenty of good in the world worth caring about. Kim and Jason initially reject their offer of friendship, but end up being accidentally dragged along to Care-a-Lot when the Bears' new teleportation device, the Rainbow Rescue Beam, malfunctions, and are quickly won over by the geniality of the Bears' community. Meanwhile, Tenderheart Bear (Billie Mae Richards) is out on another mission to help Nicholas (Hadley Kay), a socially unpopular teenager wanting desperately for company and self-esteem. Nicholas works as a backstage assistant to a carnival magician, Mr Fettucini (Brian George), and has ambitions of taking the stage himself one day, but is held back by his clumsiness and all-round lack of self-confidence. Unfortunately, Tenderheart isn't the only fantastical being in the vicinity who's heard Nicholas's cries and is eager to exert their influence - in one of Fettucini's crates, he uncovers an old book of ancient magic that so happens to be possessed by a mysterious Spirit (Jackie Borroughs), who assures Nicholas that with her supernatural powers he can force anybody to like him. Tenderheart senses something rotten about this whole arrangement and objects, but he sticks his oar in too late - Nicholas is already enraptured by the Spirit's proposition. The Spirit incapacitates Mr Fettucini by putting him into a deep sleep and encourages Nicholas to take the stage in his absence. Naturally, the Spirit's interests were never in helping Nicholas to gain his big break, but in using him as a pawn in her nefarious scheme to rid the world of caring - she sabotages his act, causing his audience to laugh at him, then plays on his desire for retaliation by having him cast a spell to make them all feel as rotten as he does. On her urging, Nicholas continues to work his anti-compassion magic, with increasingly disastrous effects on humankind's capacity for caring - and on Care-a-Lot, where sharp increases in human misery apparently manifest in the form of non-stop natural disasters.

What's never made clear, at any point, is what the Spirit actually stands to gain from any of this; the film presumes that its audience will be satisfied with the understanding that she is simply a badness to be overcome (one that seems custom-designed to infuriate the Care Bears, in explicitly advocating everything that they do not), with no deeper explanation necessary. The Spirit is probably best understood as a metaphorical villain, a manifestation of the very worst case scenario. This applies to not merely the Care Bears' in-universe fears about a world devoid of caring, but to contemporary parental fears about the various corruptive influences waiting to command the minds of ingenuous youths should they venture too far from their authority. Given the nature of the Spirit's villainy - she lures Nicholas to the dark side by selling him on the merits of real magic and getting him to recite incantations and invoke forces that he does not remotely understand - you don't have to squint terribly hard to see a parallel with the Satanic Panic that had 1980s America wringing its hands over allegations (fuelled by the Christian fundamentalist voices that dominated the era) that rock music and Dungeons & Dragons were enticing teenagers to the occult, all while devil-worshipping cults were secretly in operation at your local daycare. Tenderheart flat-out tells Nicholas that "Magic isn't the answer", a line that feels like it was inserted, if not necessarily as a sincere message to younger viewers who might be inclined to view otherwise, then as lip service to the conservative middle-class parents who were largely responsible for putting cash down to see the film. Still, The Care Bears Movie doesn't just restrict its allusions to moral hysteria about the supposed omnipresence of the occult in everyday society - as Nicholas falls increasingly under the influence of the Spirit, he develops these ominous dark patches under his eyes that cause him to resemble a heroin addict, and is reduced to scavenging around the garbage at the ruined carnival, desperate for the components needed for his next fix. The Spirit represents whatever it is that you don't want supplanting your parental sovereignty in your children's brains, with the world without caring being the logical extension of this corruption.

Putting a wrench in the Spirit's plans for total emotive conquest are Kim and Jason, who remain unaffected by Nicholas' spells due to their close proximity to the Care Bears. Although Kim and Jason have learned that they've a pair of prospective adoptive parents lined up for them back on Earth, they're reluctant to resume their lives while their new friends are facing such a dire emergency, and offer to assist the Care Bears in their fight against Nicholas and the Spirit. Unfortunately, further malfunctioning from the Rainbow Rescue Beam has them stranded in a mysterious land known as the Forest of Feelings, along with Friend Bear and Secret Bear, while the remaining Care Bears can only set off down a nearby river in the hope of reaching them. Meanwhile, Nicholas is goaded into summoning up another spirit, one who can shape-shift into different forms (anticipating the villain of Care Bears Movie II, who has the exact same ability), to hunt out Kim and Jason during their accidental excursion through the Forest of Feelings. The second spirit's actual purpose is to bridge the otherwise complete disconnect between the main conflict with Nicholas and the Spirit and the entire second act, which serves only to push us away from the task at hand so that we can get those Cousins on board. The Bears get into various jams, so that Swift Heart, Cozy Heart et al. can appear and use their individual talents to help them. Then onto Earth for a climactic showdown.

An aspect of The Care Bears Movie that stands out as almost endearingly quaint is its severely limited scope - for a film in which the emotional and social well-being of the entire world is allegedly at stake, we see very little evidence of this first-hand. "Earth", in this picture, seems to consist almost exclusively of the carnival where Nicholas works; when the carnival falls into ruin as a result of Nicholas' spell, it becomes our shorthand for that world without caring, with its symbols of broken childhood innocence and joy buried underneath the rubble of despair. While I'm sure there were a few budgetary constraints dictating these narrative restrictions, the underlying explanation is that the crisis in question isn't really about saving the world, but preventing Nicholas from being totally consumed by his allegorical addiction; this much is verbalised during the final confrontation, when Nicholas' ultimate spell fails to take full effect due to Kim and Jason still being at large, and the Care Bears specifically declare that there is still time to save him. Which they intend to do by staging a grand, rainbow-powered intervention to make Nicholas kick his socially undesirable habit.

In The Care Bears Movie, and Care Bears Movie II, the absence of caring manifests as anger and destructiveness, as opposed to mere apathy, with children (and, in the sequel, animals) running amuck and aggressively turning on anything in their paths (how the adult world is affected is not depicted, which is probably just as well). It's the kind of negative energy that the film's young demographic can recognise and respond to, albeit one that I suspect does not even touch upon the true horrors as to what a world drained of all benevolence would look like, if all our apocalypse really comes down to is a few unruly children needing to be reined in at a fairground. To my adult sensibilities, the film feels more effective in its subtler explorations of childhood angst, notably the despondence underpinning the Bears' early interactions with Kim and Jason, and the insecurity that makes Nicholas so susceptible to the wheedling of the Spirit. Just as Nicholas' character trajectory trades on parental fears about losing one's children to external contamination, Kim and Jason's looks to the opposite end of the spectrum, by addressing childhood concerns about the limitations of parental care. Before the film begins, they have experienced a trauma that has taught them something of the impermanence of life. The absence of their parents is addressed in only the vaguest, most tactful of terms - we're told that they "went away", but it's not altogether clear what we're supposed to take from that. It could be a nice, tot-friendly euphemism for indicating that they're dead, and that does seem to be the most common interpretation (the Wikipedia synopsis claims they were killed in a car accident, but that's more specificity than the film itself offers). Personally, it was always my impression that their parents were alive but had relinquished care of them. I base that partly on the fact that there does seem to be a real resentment toward their AWOL parents bubbling below the surface of their initial Care Bear encounter (which, granted, could still apply if they were dead) - Jason assures Friend Bear and Secret Bear that "people you care for" will "always let you down". In either case, Jason does have a valid point - forming any kind of emotional attachment inevitably comes with an element of risk, and he and Kim have not developed the resilience to be capable of facing up to that risk.

The film sets up a potent dilemma for Kim and Jason, but arguably finds too easy a solution. Before the first act is over, the orphans have already had their jolly getaway in Care-a-Lot and been fully converted to the path of love and caring. Mr Cherrywood's insistence that "their troubles were over" feels glib, given that the troubles in question (coping with parental death or abandonment) are not something we would expect to be remedied with an overnight fix. Somewhat inevitably, Kim and Jason become less interesting characters for the remainder of the film - they do not have an outstanding amount of personality between them, nor is there a whole lot differentiating their characters. At the start of the film, Friend Bear tells us something of their individual interests and ambitions ("Kim reads a lot and wants to be a nurse when she grows up, and Jason, you want to be a jet pilot") but none of this has any bearing on the plot. The closest either gets to a singular character arc is in Tenderheart's decision to entrust the key to the lock on the Spirit's book to Jason, but he could just as easily have given it to Kim and it wouldn't have changed a thing. Only at the climax, when Kim and Jason succeed in convincing Nicholas to come down from his power trip with a display of empathy (they remember how it felt to believe that there was nothing in life worth caring about), do they begin to feel like characters again and less like McGuffins.

Once again, the story's real interests are centred around the wayward Nicholas, whose parents are likewise completely absent, although no explanation is given in their case. The closest thing he has to a guardian is his boss Mr Fettucini - he functions as a kind of substitute parent to Nicholas, one who initially affords him little tolerance for his shortcomings, and Nicholas' movement to the dark side is clearly linked to Fettucini's failure to provide him with positive guidance, leaving the void wide open for less benevolent forces to fill. And, for what her villainy lacks in dimension, there is something eerily authentic in the way the Spirit succeeds in stringing the reluctant Nicholas along, particularly when we reach the part where she convinces him that he is to blame for what happened and will be held accountable if he does not finish what he started. At its heart, The Care Bears Movie deals with a barrage of anxieties that relate to the nascent awareness of its young audience that things cannot stay the same forever, and that parental protection may not always be there to shield them from life's misfortunes - these anxieties include the inevitability of having to deal with a world outside of the domestic sphere, the problem of distinguishing between a potential danger and a prospective friend, and of learning to trust in one's merits and survive on one's own. The role of the Care Bears in all of this is to function as a kind of stand-in for that parental guidance, wherever it is unavailable, offering judgement and a moral compass to children whose understanding of the world is still in progress. Invaluable though this input is, the ultimate necessity for the child to stand on their own is acknowledged via the limitations that are placed on the Care Bears' powers. In times of adversity, the Care Bears' best recourse is to stand together and unleash their "Care Bear Stare" - beams of positive energy are emitted from the symbols on their abdomens, which apparently have the power to ward off malevolent forces, and, in an obvious call to the importance of unity, become increasingly powerful the more Care Bears join in (this is elucidated as the Care Bears' ability to articulate their feelings, and the Cousins have an arc in the third act in which they wonder how they too can do the same, before finally settling on calling in unison). Using their patented Stare, the Care Bears are eventually able to repel the shape-shifting spirit that's been on their tail all throughout the second act. Problem is, when you later see them unleashing this same power on the teenage Nicholas, it registers more obviously as, if not an act of violence, then certainly a display of aggressive force. This hard line assertion of authority proves ineffective against Nicholas and the Spirit; what Nicholas does respond to is the understanding he receives from his peers in the form of Kim and Jason, who are actively defying Tenderheart's instructions in choosing to get close to the confrontation. The children, and not their stand-in parents, are thus privileged with the narrative's definitive redemptive power, which is posited as the triumph of empathy over forceful control.

Despite the display of unity between Nicholas, Kim and Jason at the film's climax, the final outcome seems to propel their parties in opposite directions. Kim and Jason are permitted to reclaim the childhood innocence that was taken from them too soon, in the form of their new adoptive parents. The parents are treated as a kind of status symbol, indicators that order has been restored, both to the world as a whole, and to Kim and Jason individually - hence Kim's rather cringeworthy line, "Aren't parents great?" Meanwhile, Nicholas is reconciled with his parental substitute, Mr Fettucini, but there is an equality to their final arrangement that conveys a working partnership as much as a familial unity, indicating that Nicholas has taken his first real steps toward adulthood. Fettucini has undergone a change of heart that is not explicitly linked to the intervention of the Care Bears in any way; he has decided to let Nicholas perform with him onstage - inspired, so he claims, by the wonderful dream he was having while all hell was breaking lose around his unconscious body. Unlike Kim and Jason, Nicholas does not require restoration to the security of the traditional family unit, and is instead satisfied with the reassurance that "someone would be watching over him at all times" - there is still a place his life for that kind of parental oversight, if by proxy via the Care Bears, but at a respectful distance that allows him to forge his own way.

Afterwards, we return to Mr Cherrywood, who is nearing the end of his story and is bemused that, once again, his charges have all nodded off before he could reveal the most important detail - that is, what ultimately became of Nicholas. This takes us into the movie's big twist, which, to be fair, you probably saw coming from the outset - Mr Cherrywood muses that, "I guess all they need to know is that he too lived happily ever after...happier than I ever thought I could be." In case you still didn't grasp the significance of that, his wife walks in and obligingly stipulates that, "Nicholas, these children should have been in bed ages ago." It's a nice, gentle twist that, as I say, won't feel terribly gob-smacking to anybody over the age of five (I actually don't remember if I had any strong reaction to the revelation as a three-year-old). Not only is there an obvious physical resemblance between the two, in the opening bookend numerous hints are dropped that Mr Cherrywood is an ex-circus performer - he does a juggling trick for the children and wishes that their dreams be filled with various circus-related staples, and the hat that he wears while telling his story is identical to one Nicholas wears when performing his magic act. The revelation demonstrates how Nicholas, our former junkie turned sweater-wearing patriarch, internalised his experience with the Care Bears, to the extent that he now carries on their legacy by providing that same kind of stand-in guidance to children whose own parental relations have, for whatever reason, broken down. And just when you were supposing that his whole account really was just a fanciful allegory for how he overcame addiction in his youth and was molded into an upstanding citizen, who should transpire to have been lurking outside the window the entire time but his old buddy Tenderheart Bear, who is still keeping tabs on Nicholas after all these years.

Exactly how many years might actually be a matter of some contention. I note that, in addition to having information about the fate of Kim and Jason's biological parents that is not included in the film, Wikipedia is strangely specific about the story's time frame - as per its synopsis, the framing narrative with Mr Cherrywood and his charges takes place in 1984, while the main story is set 17 years prior, in 1967. I've no idea where that came from - if there are any hard indicators of the respective temporal settings in the film itself, they passed me by - but that doesn't really track with Mr Cherrywood's presumed age in the framing story. It's never specified how old Nicholas is supposed to be during his brush with the occult, but I would estimate 17 at the oldest. And if only 17 years have passed in the interim, that would make him 34 in the modern day. You're kidding, he looks at least 50! If the framing story is meant to be set in the mid-1980s, then it would make far more sense for the main story to have taken place in the 1940s or 1950s. But then The Care Bears Movie never strikes me as a period piece in any way - it is, after all, aimed at a demographic too young to understand anything much beyond the present, and as such it seems to be set in an all-purpose childhood that does not tie itself to any specific era, nor seem radically removed from the one to which modern kids would relate. Incidentally, it's a popular assumption that Mrs Cherrywood is the grown-up Kim, given the passable physical resemblance between the two of them, although Nicholas isn't obliging enough to confirm it, addressing her only as "Mrs Cherrywood". It's an implication I can do without, for the same reason I could have done without just about everything in that epilogue to the final Harry Potter book - this idea, endemic in children's fiction, that everybody ends up getting married to people they grew up with as kids, while not exactly unheard of in real life, does seem awfully twee. But then criticising a property like the Care Bears for tweeness would be the very height of churlishness (Harry Potter has fewer excuses, but that's another story).

Nelvana continued their Care Bears streak the following year with Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation. Although this picture is nominally a sequel to the original, it's a tremendous challenge trying to consolidate the two narratives into a coherent timeline. The second movie provides a common origin story for both the Care Bears and the Care Bear Cousins, one that flat-out contradicts the events of its predecessor, which hinged on the idea that the two tribes were entirely oblivious to the other's existence until now. A New Generation saw the franchise reboot itself right out the gate, in a particularly confusing case of same characters, different continuity. It also recycles a generous number of story beats from the original, to the point that it could ostensibly be taken as a remake, at least for the first two thirds. The Care Bears befriend a couple of children, Dawn (Alyson Court) and John (Michael Fantini), who might as well be Kim and Jason all over again, only minus the traumatic backstory, and reinstate their lost confidence. Meanwhile, a particularly dejected child - a girl this time, named Christy (Cree Summer) - has her own pleas for acceptance answered by a very different kind of being, a malevolent shape-shifting entity named Dark Heart (Hadley Kay), who is intent on eliminating the Care Bears and manipulates the impressionable Christy into doing his bidding. Like the Spirit before him, Dark Heart is a Satanically-coded villain - whatever guise he assumes, he's always an ominous shade of red, and his dubious deal takes the form of a Faustian bargain, enabling Christy to surpass her peers in exchange for her allegiances. Also like the Spirit, his motivation for wanting to rid the world of all positive feeling is never established, although in Dark Heart's case it is at least suggested that he has a long-standing vendetta with the Care Bear elders, True Heart Bear (Maxine Miller) and Noble Heart Horse (Pam Hyatt), that he's anxious to settle. The greatest differentiating factor lies in the dynamic between pawn and villain - Dark Heart appears to Christy in the form of a human child, giving her the thinly-held illusion that she's dealing with one of her peers, and it's as clear as day that the film's producers fully intended for their young audience to ship the two as a couple. This has a significant bearing on the final outcome of the story - whereas the original ends with Nicholas rejecting the Spirit and literally closing the book on her, A New Generation ends with Christy managing to re-educate Dark Heart by teaching him something unexpected about the quality of mercy. Ostensibly, Christy is the sequel's analogue to Nicholas, with the twist that Dark Heart was the story's real lost child all along (an outcome telegraphed in the fact that he shares the same voice as Nicholas), a metaphor fully realised in the film's conclusion. When, ultimately, Dark Heart loses his malefic powers and finds himself permanently stranded in his human form, he treats it as a cause for tremendous celebration.

Like its predecessor, the Earthly events in A New Generation are restricted to a single setting, a summer camp, which also becomes a wasteland of uncaring as the villain exerts their influence. A summer camp, though, doesn't offer quite the same sense of delirious childhood thrills as a carnival - rather, it's fraught with anxieties over parental separation and banishment from home into the dark unknown (no coincidence that by 1986 it was already a well-established setting for slasher movies). A New Generation goes a step further in doing away with a purpose for parents in this universe altogether. Unlike the original, there are no adult humans in A New Generation; instead, the children appear to run the camp by themselves, in a Lord of The Flies type scenario, with the most capable child, or "camp champ", attaining the privilege of getting to order their inferiors about, a status that Christy covets to her detriment. True Heart and Noble Heart fulfil vital roles as parental figures to the Bears and the Cousins, but down on Earth parents are such a non-issue that when Dark Heart becomes a child full-time, it's never established how he's going to survive in the world, given that he has no family or means of support. The substitute family unit comprised of Dawn, John, Christy and Dark Heart (another awkward question that's never addressed...is he still going to answer to that baleful moniker?) is regarded as security enough. Dark Heart is last seen declaring his intention to remain at the camp and create an equal society where everybody is recognised as camp champ. The impermanence of life is again acknowledged through the coming of age of the Bears and Cousins, which occurs alongside Dark Heart's dealings at the camp, but the camp itself seems to exist within an endless summer in which the occupants never have to acknowledge the realities of the world beyond...if indeed there is a beyond at all. The final outcome presents a compromise between the two alternate states represented at the end of The Care Bears Movie, privileging the children of A New Generation with the dual status of adulthood and childhood at once and enabling them to affirm their independence while remaining perpetually in their utopia of youthful purity. The recovery of youthful innocence, as symbolised through Dark Heart's transformation, is posited as redemptive in the face of life's despair, a point reinforced in the film's closing song, "Forever Young" (no, not the one about impending nuclear war), which emphasises a correlation between staying a child at heart and staying receptive to one's emotions.

The limitations of the parental oversight embodied by the Care Bears are tested to a much greater degree in A New Generation. The film has an anti-violence message, even more pronounced than that of the original, in that it implicates not only Dark Heart, but also the Care Bears themselves in the wrongdoing. In the film's third act, True Heart and Noble Heart make the misguided decision to abandon their charges to pursue a weakened Dark Heart (unaware that they are being tricked into following his shadow) with the intention of finishing off his evil for good. It's never explicitly stated, but they do mean to kill him, right? This is clearly at odds with Christy's philosophy, vindicated at the end of the film, that all living things, good or bad, are entitled to a basic degree of compassion. Hence why she is unable to abandon the hopelessly accident-prone Dark Heart when he is on course for a watery grave, a point Christy uses to reassert her moral superiority over him, recognising how much she has compromised herself through their association ("Maybe that's the only difference between us"). Later, during the climactic confrontation between Dark Heart and the Care Bears, Christy intervenes and gets caught in the crossfire, and is potentially killed (or petrified/enchanted...it's admittedly difficult to tell). Dark Heart ceases his attack and implores the Care Bears to reverse the process, but they regretfully tell him that this is beyond their power. This prompts Dark Heart to ask the Care Bears a question to which they seemingly have no answer - "What good is all your love, your caring, if it cannot save this child?" - and I have encountered at least one person who found the implications of that objectionable. Would the kind and loving values that the Care Bears stand for really have been rendered meaningless if they were unable to pull off something as miraculous as raising the dead (or petrified/enchanted)? Or are the Bears perhaps being called out for their hypocrisy, given that they were unable to see in Dark Heart what Christy did - that is, the vulnerable person (or whatever he is) underneath? It's in Dark Heart's guileless response to the issue of death that we see shades of the same anger articulated by Kim and Jason at the start of the original film; they're all characters who are experiencing loss for the first time and have no idea how to process it. Once again, we are offered too easy a solution, albeit one that invites the active input of the audience to demonstrate their own capacity for caring. In a plot point lifted wholesale from Tinkerbell's resurrection in Peter Pan, the viewer is urged to join in with the Care Bears as they all cry out in unison how much they care, in an act of defiance against the tragedy that threatens to claim their friend. It goes without saying that Christy will be fine whether you put in the effort for her or not. All that matters is that her demonic boyfriend is eventually able to add his own voice to the crowd, and that proves to be the tipping point. Christy is revived, and Dark Heart can never go back to what he was.

Hokey? You bet. It also allows the film to duck out of answering the surprisingly weighty question put to the Care Bears by Dark Heart. But again, when you're dealing with a property like the Care Bears, a little hokiness goes along with the territory. And besides, this device does appear to be a fairly prevalent one in children's media. Thirteen years later we saw the exact same plot point show up in Pokemon: The First Movie - no explicit call for audience participation this time, but Ash/Satoshi is revived from a similarly unresponsive state by the oddly unpleasant creatures (Halliwell's description, not mine) who gather around his smoking corpse and weep for him in unison. Given that this is in total defiance of how death works in the real world, I wonder what it is about this device that should make it so appealing to these movies' creators? There is, perhaps, something deeply harrowing about the wish fulfilment, the desire to override grief by desperately pleading with the cosmos that it not be so, the takeaway being that it's in this shared helplessness in the scheme of things that we should recognise our unity, and consequently our strength.

And since the film tiptoes up to the issue of mortality without ever quite venturing in, I'm left with another question regarding Dark Heart - given the ingenuousness of his comprehension of death while Christy's life is on the line, when he becomes fully human at the end of the film...does he appreciate that death is an inevitable part of the package? Or is that whole matter negated with it being endlessly summer around here?