The Care Bears Movie - Review (Part 1)

Hello, my beautiful fairies! My name is Claire Aimée, your fairy Clairy Godmother, and you know what you’re here for: cartoons! I’ve been a cartoon addict ever since I was a wee little pixie, and I am always on the prowl for new pieces of animation to indulge myself with. Watching them, talking about them, and studying them in these reviews and retrospectives is a huge part of my life. Sure, I don’t think I’ll ever be an animator myself one day, but I do everything from voice acting to illustration work inspired by my love of animation in general. Of course, it can be hard to count your favorites or the most memorable cartoons when you watch as many as I do. Gargoyles is my absolute favorite show of all time, while my other favorite choices are rather cliché: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Batman: The Animated Series, Gravity Falls, Steven Universe; very stereotypically critically-acclaimed stuff.

But my favorite kinds of cartoons to watch in terms of retrospectives are simply the fringe weirdos of the animation world: things I’ve made older videos on like Happy Ness: Secret of the Loch, Casper’s Scare School, or The Secret World of Santa Claus. These are the cartoons I find the most fascinating to both watch and talk about, and one of my dearest passions is finding these obscure gems (or pieces of garbage) and finding ways to preserve them as well as using them to talk about children’s media as a whole through discussions on writing, themes, morals, and creativity. But even across my adventures in animation, there’s always one cartoon that just sticks with you. It can be a good one, a bad one, or just a bizarre one. Whatever the reason it catches your attention and imagination, it’s something that just makes you want to dive in and explore every bit and bob of it like you’re dissecting a mythical creature to discover its magic.

And for me, that’s the Care Bears.

 

I have been wanting to do a retrospective of this show for years. And after many years of experimenting with styles, honing my art and writing skills, and even finding various mediums to showcase my reviews (from videos to blogs), I finally think I’m ready to cover this one with all the chaos it brings and the chaos it deserves. Because it’s the perfect show for someone like me to look over: it’s as iconic as it is genuinely unexplored, infuriating, and downright bizarre. Because you do not know the Care Bears. You know the toys and the over-the-top parodies you see on TV, but you have not opened up the actual Pandora’s Box of saccharine insanity that is this franchise. 

And that is what I hope to explore by looking over every episode of easily the most infamous incarnation of this pop culture parasite: The Care Bears Family from 1986. I made a promise a long time ago that if I gained over 1000 subscribers on YouTube, I’d make a video on these little bears, but now that I’ve moved over from videomaking to blogging, I still feel it’s time I keep that promise in an unexpected way! However, before we do that, I figured it’d only be appropriate if we talked about the feature film. As is obvious, the story of these otherworldly ursines doesn’t start with this film incarnation, and the story behind these creatures is actually quite fascinating. From frustration to creativity, from a simple idea for greeting cards made on commission to a multi-media franchise that dominated its era’s culture. Strap yourself into a cloud because I’m taking you on a roller coaster ride across a sky swarming with bears… 

 

The division went into production of two heavily-protected development projects, simply titled “Project 1” and “Project 2”. “Project 1” would end up becoming the franchise Strawberry Shortcake, created in 1973 by freelance artist Barbi Sargent. But the franchise wasn’t finalized until around 1976, where it was expanded upon by soon-to-be famous children’s artist Muriel Fahrion (she comes back later). She expanded the budding Strawberry Shortcake brand with dozens of new characters and illustrations. Eventually, Muriel’s sister Susan wanted to make dolls of these friendly fruit-girls, so teamed up with Kenner productions to make a series of scented dolls. Strawberry Shortcake was an incredibly popular media franchise in the 1980s growing a garden of greeting cards, storybooks, fruit-scented dolls, adorable animated specials… if you could slap her face on it, they sold it. In fact, Kenner loved their work with American Greetings so much that they wanted to expand their toy brand by introducing a line of teddy bears and having TCFC help with the development. In a 2017 interview with Cleveland Magazine, Ralph Shaffer recounted the development of the series being incredibly frustrating, but also described the parts where the franchise started forming together as, “Like the clouds opening and the sun shining.” 

Shaffer: “Forty percent of the plush market was teddy bears, so [Kenner] wanted to try something with bears. We came back to Cleveland and, immediately, it was mental fatigue: What in the heck are we going to do that’s different? You need a lot of designs to launch a new card line. We could only think of so many symbols, and then we ran out of gas. We had done all this research, and I had all this artwork on symbolism lying on my desk. It’d been three months since our meeting with Kenner, and I was still trying to come up with something. I’m sitting here looking at a simple pencil sketch of a bear and thinking, What in the Hell am I going to do with the bears? Something in my head just took those graphics and flopped them over on the bear’s stomach. I drew that heart on that bear. Boom! The clouds opened up and the sun shined. All of a sudden we had this little creature that represented human emotions. It helped parents talk to their kids about their emotions, and friendship and love. The whole formula for Care Bears could be written on a half a piece of paper. Once you have the formula, the whole thing falls into place.”

With the idea for emotion-based teddy bears with universal symbols on their tummies in place, TCFC enlisted the help of two illustrators: upcoming cartoonist Dave Polter and children’s artist Elena Kucharik, the latter of whom is considered the creator of Care Bears. 

Polter: “I was 24 and freelancing, trying to establish myself as a cartoonist. I wanted to be the next Charles Schulz. Ralph gave me an interview and then gave me an assignment to work on a card line that used symbols to convey emotions- things like hearts and rainbows. I was hired full time at American Greetings that April.”

Kucharik “We went back and forth with changes for a while, making the bears shorter and pudgier. Finally, they said, ‘We have the bears.’”  

Five expert designers worked on over 100 prototypes under lead designer Sue Trentel. She was described as a ‘genius plush designer’ by Shaffer: “You could give her a piece of artwork, and she could translate it into a three-dimensional plush design. She was just magic.” The team counted inspiration from the Steiff bear- the first stuffed bear with movable arms and legs, which took its name from President Theodore Roosevelt- and put a heart-shaped button on the back to make them official. They even got a patent for the graphic application on a bear's stomach, which was reportedly very hard to do and rare at the time. When trying to come up with a name (original ideas included Tubbies and Messenger Bears), it was Dave and Elena’s boss Lin Edwards who told Shaffer to name them Care Bears, to which Shaffer once again described it as: “Oh God, the clouds parted and the sun shone again.”

Shaffer: “We had 10 bears, each a different color, representing 10 different emotions: Bedtime Bear, Birthday Bear, Cheer Bear, Friend Bear, Funshine Bear, Good Luck Bear, Love-a-Lot Bear, Tenderheart Bear and Wish Bear. As I’m sitting there, looking at all these saccharine honey-sweet teddy bears, I said, “We need a relief in this bunch. Let’s do a counter bear to all this sweetness. Let’s do a Grumpy Bear.””

Polter was also especially proud of the bears, mentioning diversity as part of their appeal: looking young and funny, but having the ability to do or say anything. “Bears are the ultimate anthropomorphic character,” he stated. Polter was also primarily responsible for coming up with much of the lore surrounding the franchise, suggesting them living in a castle and going on ‘missions of caring’. And apparently Kenner saw that charm that Dave did, and reportedly loved the idea… but they still needed a marketing plan. The team meticulously lined up a range of big-name companies to license the concept while the toys and cards were being developed. It took them a total of two years in development to reach the launch date.

Shaffer: “We didn’t just build a character; we approached it like a D-Day invasion. We lined everybody up to license the thing at the same time. It took us two years in development to get to that launch date.

Kucharik: “I did most of the finished art for the style manual, which was given to all licensees. I worked like 24/7 on that for the first couple years. In the beginning of the guide there is a double-page spread of the Care Bear alphabet. Next came the story of the Care Bears. After that, each bear had a page showing them in full color from a front view, with pencil sketches from the side and three-quarter views and the Pantone matching system color assigned to that bear. Facing each of those pages was a description of the bear with more pencil sketches, including the tummy symbols.”

After hundreds of deals negotiated and reported squabbling over percentages with licensees, After two years and millions of dollars, Care Bears was privately introduced to investors in 1982 and then to the world at the 1983 Toy Fair in New York City, where a Broadway-style play was planned to celebrate the launch. Both Shaffer and Chojnacki credited a man named Tom Schneider in helping to maintain consistency and creative direction.

Shaffer: “We gave the manual to licensees, and it was their choice whether we did the art or they used their own artist. But they had to send in the artwork for our approval. We had a bulldog director, Tom Schneider — I loved the guy; he’s passed away — who was responsible for keeping that look going. We’d have panicked licensees putting their art directors on airplanes and flying them in. We’d have to sort of put them through school.”

Chojnacki: “Tom was just an enormously capable visual genius. He had to look at and approve every product by every licensee. We needed Care Bears underwear to have the same look as Care Bears sheets. That gave us consistency of image and made it hard to do knockoffs.”

 

After two years and millions of dollars in development, Care Bears were introduced to investors in 1982 and then to the world at the 1983 New York City Toy Fair. Bernie Loomis, the president of Kenner who had connections in theatre, originally proposed a Care Bears Broadway play to launch the brand to investors. And while it was a silly idea, the idea started to lose its silliness when said play was given over a million dollars to become reality.

Shaffer: “Everything cost a million dollars. It was a one-shot deal. One night. The concept was that Strawberry Shortcake introduced the Care Bears to the world. We launched in March because we knew Easter is a good time for stuffed toys. We also did 16 running feet of Care Bear cards in the stores. In the first year, we sold $40 million worth of greetings cards. The licensees loved it. We loved it, because they saw what we were doing and how big it was. We had 750 people there.” 

Jack Chojnacki described the success as instantaneous: “One day, there were no Care Bears and, the next day, everyone thought Care Bears had been forever.”

And that’s how this rainbow-soaked series infamous for its lack of edge had a very ambitiously driven, ruthlessly marketed, and genuinely passionate birth from angry doodles on a man’s desk to being showcased on a literal world stage. If you want to know more about this series’ history, I recommend the YouTube video by Secret Galaxy: The Calculated History of The Care Bears. Quite a compelling creation process, but we’ve only just begun. With the blood-and-honey-soaked production of the Care Bears themselves done, let’s look over the movie. (Yes, I’m aware that there were two animated specials and a miniseries before this movie, The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings and The Care Bears Battle the Freeze Machine, but I do plan on getting to those later. Because, let’s be frank, you probably don’t care that much.

The Care Bears Movie was the first Care Bears feature film of the franchise, released on March 23rd 1985. The movie was created by the Toronto-based animation studio Nelvana. This well-loved Canadian studio with its iconic polar bear logo was founded in 1971 by three film students: Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert, and Clive A. Smith. 

Hirsh: “At the time, there was no production industry per se in Canada, either in animation or in television production. There were stations making local shows, but you didn't have people making programs for sale around the world. So, blissfully unaware of all it would involve, we decided to start a company in Toronto.”

If you don’t recognize this studio, you’re probably not Canadian, and their long history would be a trial and a half to summarize. But if you need a brief idea of their catalogue, many of Nelvana's TV shows are based on properties like children’s books, foreign franchises like England's Thomas the Tank Engine, and other pieces of media. Some of the shows you might recognize from them include The Adventures of Tintin, Clone High, Bob & Margaret, The Berenstain Bears, Franklin, Little Bear, The Magic School Bus, Jane and the Dragon, Pippi Longstocking, Redwall, Beetlejuice, and Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends. And again, that is only a few.

But before all that, the studio made mostly one-off animated shorts and even live-action/animation hybrids throughout the 1970s. Their most infamous example of work from this time being the “The Faithful Wookie” animated segment in 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special, regarded as the worst Star Wars film ever made (where even George Lucas himself despised the end product). …But Nelvana wanted to change all that by the 1980s, choosing to make its first feature film: a dark and gritty musical sci-fi adventure called Rock & Rule, a choice inspired by Clive A. Smith’s love of rock music.

And it bombed. Hard.

Rock & Rule took five years to produce, using all of the studio's resources and costing over $8 million to finish in 1983. The movie had little to no promotion in Canada or the United States, not even being helped by their partners at MGM/UA, and ended up grossing an embarrassing $30,000. This meant the studio's dreams for adult animated feature films tanked, and its failure threatened to take the entire studio down with it. The company, in order to survive, had to go with a market that was the polar opposite of their dream direction but a market that never failed in animation: children’s television.

Nelvana produced the first season of Inspector Gadget with DIC Entertainment, and the pilot episode of The Get Along Gang, along with many toy-based properties. However, one of the companies they teamed up with was American Greetings, in order to produce three Strawberry Shortcake specials: Strawberry Shortcake: Housewarming Surprise, Strawberry Shortcake and the Baby Without a Name, and Strawberry Shortcake Meets the Berrykins. Due to their success with Strawberry Shortcake, American Greetings approached Nelvana to make their second full-length animated movie: that brings us back to the bears.

In 1985, The Care Bears Movie grossed over $23 million in the United States, and a nice extra $1 million in its native country of Canada, turning Nelvana’s company assets around. In case you’re wondering how much money that is? Disney’s own animated fantasy feature, The Black Claudron, grossed only $21.3 million. The Care Bears Movie had been in theaters for several months at that point, yet still managed to get more butts in seats than a $44 million dollar Disney epic. (Don’t feel too bad, though: I’ve seen The Black Claudron, and it’s a terrible movie that deserved to flop. Don’t expect a review of that disaster.) With two sequels and a television series, also made by Nelvana, it’s safe to say The Care Bears Movie was a big hit and likely saved one of Canada’s most famous (if not first) animation production studios. Thankfully Nelvana continues to live today to produce dozens of children’s shows, albeit with some debts to pay off and Chorus Entertainment buying the company in 2000. I even met a few staff members at the 2022 Ottawa Animation Festival I attended, who all seemed lovely and even were listing for potential jobs at the company.

As you can see, Care Bears is still proudly listed on Nelvana’s official website.

As for the movie itself, The Care Bears Movie was directed by Canadian animator Arna Selznick, who began her career at Nelvana as a layout artist for Rock & Rule and was the director of Strawberry Shortcake and the Baby Without a Name. During her employment, she met her future husband John van Bruggen, who she would eventually form a studio with called Dancingmonkeys. This makes Selznick not only the first Canadian woman to direct a mainstream animated feature, but the third woman EVER to direct a mainstream animated feature. Right after Germany’s Lotte Reiniger who directed The Adventures of Prince Achmed in 1927, and England’s Joy Batchelor who directed Animal Farm in 1954.

Arna Selznick as she is today (2025)

Arna Selznick today still works in the industry as primarily a storyboard and layout artist. Her latest project was working as the main storyboard artist on The Paw Patrol Movie. Ah, one toycentric fad of the 1980s to the same thing in the 2020s. It truly comes full circle. But hey, at least we can call The Care Bears Movie somewhat revolutionary for its time… content of the film notwithstanding. The film even won Canada's Golden Reel Award for the highest-grossing local production in 1985. Yes, this stupid children’s movie about magical bears is technically a mark in animation history for female animation directors, high-grossing animated films of the 1980s, and one of the first fully-animated Canadian films (even outgrossing Disney at the time).

“The film received mixed reviews from critics and audiences. While the film resonated well with a smaller audience, many have criticized the film for being too childish and underdeveloped for the big screen. It’s been said that the film would’ve worked better as an extended Saturday morning cartoon for television rather than a theatrical motion picture. However, the film was an unexpected box-office success grossing up to $34 million worldwide on a $2 million budget which saved Nelvana’s studio from shutting down.” - The Care Bears Wiki 

Yes, all that history and prestige and legacy… for something called The Care Bears Movie. But how about we actually dive in and look over this movie front to back? Overlooking the story, exploring its themes (if there are any), and seeing what all the fuss is about. Pray for me, please. We’re going to the sky next time with Your Clairy Godmother.