This isn’t exactly what I was planning to watch tonight, but while watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic on The Hub, I’ve been having to sit through countless episodes of Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventures. It’s not a good show, in the sense that I feel like it really talks down to its audience sometimes. But I’ve never been able to bring myself to hate it or even actively dislike it. Anyway, I was bored and browsing Netflix and decided to watch the movie that essentially acted as a pilot for the show to see if it was of equal, greater or lesser quality. And honestly, it evens out pretty well.
Strawberry Shortcake (Anna Cummer) is a tiny humanoid creature who lives among flowers in Berry Bitty City with her friends Lemon (Andrea Libman), Plum (Ashleigh Ball), Orange (Janyse Jaud), Blueberry (Britt McKillip) and Raspberry (Ingrid Nilson), as well as the Berrykins and a caterpillar named Mr. Longface. After a giant boulder falls onto their town’s water supply, the girls set out with Mr. Longface to find a special rock that can bring back their water via magic.
I know that explanation of the show certainly doesn’t sell it but it’s a very colorful, lighthearted show with some nice music (although the lyrics to the songs are awful, all of them). I like the characters and how not only do each of them have their own personalities, but they’re at least somewhat multidimensional and, even more important, they each have jobs and responsibilities instead of just existing as simple tropes for the little girls watching to mindlessly enjoy. I like that the show actually teaches work ethic and allows its characters to be role models.
But I’m supposed to be talking about the movie, which is supposed to, I would assume, establish the characters, who they are, what they do, and the like. But the movie really doesn’t do any of this. All I know about the characters I know from the show, and if I had watched the movie first I probably wouldn’t have a clue who these characters were and probably wouldn’t have been able to tolerated it. On one hand I can understand writing it like this, where you could watch it in any order with the show and it would feel like just another episode, only longer. On the other hand it does sort of work against everything I just praised the show for.
For the most part the movie is just like a long episode, only it was made well over a year before the show came about and it shows in the animation. The show was a serious upgrade in terms of animation quality, with characters in the movie having much more stilted movements and less animated hair. But where it really feels too much like the show is in how it gets to its story. Mr. Longface makes up a lie about a magic rock after their water supply goes away, and that leads to the entire story arc that takes place most of the movie. Once he finally confesses, not only does it make the journey feel like a complete waste of time (it wasn’t technically, but it FEELS like it) but it makes Mr. Longface look like a terrible "person" for having made them go through all that. They eventually accept his apology but they were completely justified in not doing so. He very nearly ruins the lives of these girls all because of these stories he’s been making up. It just put a bad taste in my mouth.
I am pretty much completely apathetic toward this movie. If your kid wants to watch it, or even if I had a kid and she wanted to watch it, I would let her without question. But it’s something that is made strictly for its target audience. Then again, I doubt anybody outside of that target would go out of their way to watch it anyway.
Final Verdict: 