Care Bears other shows I care not to mention when I was young. I didn’t even get into Transformers until 2000! I wish now that my tastes as a child were a little different, but you can’t go back in time and change things. The point of this being that I have never seen He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword, and so my opinion should be as neutral as they come!
Following the Masters of the Universe series, Mattel decided to create a new female version of He-Man for girls rather than boys. To introduce this new She-Ra character, Mattel opted to create a “He-Man and She-Ra” film, which was actually five episodes of the regular animated series edited into a theatrical film (hence why the film has FIVE directors!). There are many reasons why Mattel has been the topped the toy company list for many years (although that distinction currently belongs to Lego), and using one of your top properties to introduce fans to a new one is somewhere on that list.
With all that said, if you’re still reading this, onto the film…!
The opening theme song makes this obvious to me that this is not truthfully He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword; it’s She-Ra and He-Man: The Secret of the Sword. It also makes me think He-Man and She-Ra are lovers. We’ll find out otherwise later.
Interestingly enough, the main villain of the movie is Hordak, but he gets billed behind the classic He-Man villain Skeletor. Cartoon politics!
The story starts off with Prince Adam going on a quest to Etheria in search of the lady to give a sword to. He ends up battling the Horde and meeting Adora, a rather naive young lady who seems nice but is working with the Horde. She ends up taking He-Man captive, but in doing so, she gives him a chance to get her to question everything she’s known all of her life in a manner of mere sentences. He-Man does his best to get Adora to change her ways, but he’s got to break through years of spells from Shadow Weaver’s spells in order to convince Force Captain Adora that she is on the wrong side. Oh, and they’re twins! What ends up happening is predictable, of course, but this is an ’80s cartoon, after all.
The pace of the story is not great. This was not written by Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward (of Beast Wars) to be a theatrical film, but rather a five-episode mini-series. Perhaps viewing the movie with that in mind will help, but there is definitely an issue with the film’s story structure as a result of this. The dialogue ranges from cheesy to ultra-cheesy at times, but I’m not sure there was anything else on the menu.
The voice acting is generally not very good. If Cringer was in this movie any more, I don’t think I could’ve made it through 30, much less 90 minutes. 75% of the characters seem to have a weird voice quirk, and that gets annoying fast. I understand that they had a cast of seven splitting 25 characters (unevenly), but it doesn’t excuse that some of the characters are simply difficult to bear. With all that said, I don’t think everyone was bad – I thought George DiCenzo did a good job as Hordak. I’m also not going to run down the actors, because the deficiencies could be in the acting, the directing or the fact that they had too many characters to voice. Not everybody is Mel Blanc.
The animation, to me, is unimpressive. I am comparing it to animated movies produced in the same time period, such as Transformers: The Movie and G.I. Joe: The Movie. There’s plenty of stock animation used. I don’t know at what point it was decided to be made into a movie, but I’m guessing it was after it was animated. If it was before, I would presume they didn’t decide to increase the budget at all now that they were making these television episodes into a theatrical release.
Sound effects are very much a product of their time, which is not a compliment. This means a lot of “whoosh” effects and the like. The background music is bland at best. The music in the movie was done by Erika Lane, Haim Saban and Shuki Levy. I don’t recognize the first name, but the second two, I certainly recognize!
If you’re reading this review and absolutely raging that I don’t get it, or that I’m missing something, I understand. This is something you probably grew up with. Truthfully, I don’t feel that you can fairly criticize something by the standards from 20 years in the future. That doesn’t make sense. This produced for a children’s audience 20 years ago with no thought as to how an adult viewers would look at it in 2015 and beyond.
As for whether or not I can recommend He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword, I don’t feel there is any need to recommend it or not. Most who are going to see this film have already seen it – I’m a rare exception. If you are one who enjoyed this movie 20 years ago and are wondering if you should watch it again, I would recommend doing so if you have no trouble getting caught up in nostalgia. If you are going to be critical, you will find that it probably doesn’t live up to your 20-year-old memories (but what would?). Simply put, He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword is a 1985 animated action/fantasy film. When you’re looking for such a thing, it won’t disappoint!