AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

morrison-dylan-fan Searching round for an animation DVD to pick up for a friend as a Christmas gift,I was surprised to stumble across a Rainbow Brite boxset,which along with containing the entire series,also featured a spin-off movie.With having some memories of the show,and also having never heard about the movie version before,I felt that it would be a good time to find out how "brite" this rainbow really is.The plot:Visiting earth from Rainbow Land,so that she can officially bring the long Winter season to an end,Rainbow Brite is horrified to discover that someone has stopped sunlight from reaching earth,by covering up a near by diamond planet called Spectra.Fearing that all life will soon die out on earth,Brite rushes to the planet Spectra,where she soon finds out,that diamonds really aren't forever.View on the film:Despite the supporting character's having ear gratingly high-pitched voices,the lead voice cast thankfully contrast this,by each giving terrific performances,with Peter Cullen, (aka:Optimus Prime!) stealing every scene as the boo-hiss baddie Murky Dismal,and Bettina Bush giving a graceful performance as Rainbow Brite.Shooting the film in a "key" animation style, (where the bare minimum of a character's movement is used) director's Bernard Deyries and Kimio Yabuki cover the movie's clear low budget (the movie held the record for being the quickest animated film production:3 months) by splashing primary colour's across the screen,which with showing the dark shadow chocking out the light from the planet Spectra,also gives this delightfully brite rainbow a shining appearance.

heelsgirl Do not operate heavy machinery while watching this movie. No seriously I loved it, especially the colorful characters, the wonderful music and the stunning animation. It pays to have a friend like Rainbow Brite, a girl who has a sunny outlook on life and is positive about everything. She is never sad, even when it rains. I'm a child of the 80's and I loved every movie based on a cartoon series of that decade. I loved The Care Bears Movie, The Littles and The Chipmunks. But Rainbow Brite is the best of them all. It's like Strawberry Shortcake meets The Smurfs.Good morals surround this film and it's message survives today: Be kind to others, make new friends, love the earth, and above all love yourself. See this movie, you will never forgive yourself if you don't. A word of note though, this movie hasn't been seen on DVD for awhile. It came out for a short time but then it kind of disappeared, I hope it makes a comeback soon.

babygirl-69 People talk about how horrible the script was, and how horrible the animation was, but Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer really is a Japanese Anime aimed towards children. If you look at the anime today it's done in the same style, and it's immensely popular. I don't think this movie was ever intended to be viewed by adults. Just as I don't think it was ever intended to be serious. The very things that people seem to hate about this movie are the things that I love. Rainbow Brite is one of the best cartoon characters ever created in my opinion. She's smart. She's funny. She cares about the enviorment. She cares about her friends. This movie can teach so much to young kids. My little brothers even liked this movie. I have to say this movie taught me a lot when I was a kid. When it came out on DVD I was first in line to buy it. It's a great kids movie. So what if it's not perfect, nothing is really perfect when you look closely enough at it.

San Franciscan I remember years ago reading in a TV Guide an article about a video store which asked you to select more than one movie title just in case one or the other was already checked out (it was written because back during this time period rental stores were still a new novelty to many at the time), and it mentioned a young teenage girl who was babysitting a small boy who was around five years old. The boy's parents had instructed her to let him select a movie to keep him occupied, and they were standing in line with the two titles he had selected: "The Shaggy Dog" and "Rainbow Brite and The Star Stealer."When interviewed, she remarked with freaked-out anxiousness, "I sure hope it's 'The Shaggy Dog' they've got. I'll ***DIE*** if it's 'Rainbow Brite'." The article described her as making the comment with "all the air of one about to get sick on the carpet."She spoke pretty much for everybody out there except a tiny select few who were introduced to this film as small girls back during the time period. That's because we have here what just might be the one film that single-handedly represnts everything terrible that happened to animation during the eighties!Now to be fair, there were a lot of "cute" children's cartoons that came out during the period which were designed strictly to be animated advertisements for the toys they were based on. (I exempt "The Smurfs" from this list not only because they were great, but because they were never designed to sell toys in the first place and were in fact based on a famous European comic strip.) Most of them were terrrible with cheap animation and dumbed-down plots. The only film out of all of them which has managed to amazingly age with grace is "The Care Bears Movie".Now, I don't have a big problem with cartoons designed for young girls--provided they are done right. For example, I actually enjoyed watching the "Strawberry Shortcake" specials made for television during the time because they had a lot of deliberately silly humour and also because they actually had imagination to the concept (adults will now see all the tounge-in-cheek jokes in "Shortcake" that went over their heads as toddlers). But this one isn't even fun on a campy level, save for the portions where it becomes unintentionally hilarious. It's just bad bad bad bad BAD.I've always got the impression that Rainbow Brite was created as a Care Bears ripoff, and that point of view remains unchanged today. It is simply the most unoriginal and unimaginative of all the eighties offerings in its genre. Everything present here has been done before better somewhere else by even cheap lousy cartoons from the time which just somehow managed to not be AS cheap and badly written as this one. It was also considered a bomb compared to its competition, and if you dare see it you'll see why. Oh yes, it also has the most self-conscious and pretentious voice acting I've ever encountered this side of badly-dubbed anime.As a friend of mine once remarked, "Don't let kids watch this film unless you want them to learn bad manners from Rainbow Brite's stuck-up horse! Can you imagine how many little kids will watch this film and all want to grow up to be stuck-up horses?!" (No, I'm not kidding about that description of Starlite, it's true.)Avoid, avoid, avoid. Unless you take a particularly wicked pleasure in watching an animated embarrassment fall on its face, that is.(Oh, by the way, in case you were wondering... the teenage girl I mentioned was later relieved to the point of jumping and shouting "ALRIIIGHT!" when she learned her young charge had gotten his hands on 'The Shaggy Dog' instead.)