What? I'm a child of the 80's. I remembered seeing this when I was a kid, during that phase where I was really into horses. I loved My Little Pony and read all the Black Stallion series. A talking horse that could run on rainbows was pretty high on my list of Awesome Things, only supplanted later by She-Ra's horse that could turn into a unicorn. My mother was very excited because she has had a life-long love of horses and hoped to be able to share that, but it was just a passing fancy that was over by age 10. In that time, however, I managed to cram a ton of horse shows into my tiny brain and, occasionally, I get nostalgic for the things of my youth and dust off some piece of memorabilia for review.
This one has not fared well with the passage of time. Holy crap, this animation sucks. It's like everything was a still frame except for the mouths of the characters so there's a creepy disconnect between their blank faces. The voice work is not great, either. Everyone is high-pitched and grating. I'm sure that's to make them seem more child-like but as an adult, it's horrible.
Rainbow Brite is all excited because Spring is finally here and she can bring color to the world again via rainbows. Then, a mechanical horse shows up and tells her that there's a problem on the planet Spectra. Spectra is made completely of diamond (actually foreshadowing the discovery of one from earlier this year) and controls all the light in the universe. An evil gem-hungry princess is covering the planet with nets in order to possess it for herself. Rainbow Brite must put a stop to this before all the life in the universe is wiped out.
There's almost no reason to watch this movie as an adult. It is, frankly, a crap film and there is so much more in the way of intelligent anime. That being said, if you have a little girl around 5-7 years old, it's available on Streaming from Netflix so you could just download it straight to your phone, hand it over with some headphones, and enjoy a blissfully quiet car ride.
On an unrelated TV note, the first new Fall show to get the axe is The Playboy Club, cancelled after only four episodes. Apparently, it was in the middle of filming episode 6 when it got the news. Ouch. It's a shame, really. Good concept, good acting, good direction, it just couldn't seem to find an audience. It probably would have done great on HBO or Showtime.
In my slow working through Rob's movies, I watched the first season of The 4400 over the last couple of days. I was not blown away. It's about 4400 people who vanished from various points in history only to appear on the shore of a lake in Washington in 2006. None of them have aged and they slowly realize that they now have certain powers. I was hoping for aliens but the first season reveals that they're actually being manipulated by people from the future in order to avert catastrophe.
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