I don't think the Care Bears have been made over to look more "flirty" or skinny to comply with modern standards of beauty. That one is more about complying with modern standards of good, appealing cartoon character design.

A quick FYI about Barbies: While the arched back is a fair complaint, the "1998 Bellybutton body", (Pictured as the 00's body above) also reduced the bust line significantly (which you can see from that picture), and widened the waist some. 

See here: http://www.thebdoll.com/gallery/albums/batch/sebby/bodytypes/most_common_Barbie_bodies.jpg for a full array of the history of Barbie bodies, oldest to newest. Barbies marketed to children today are almost entirely Bellybutton and Fashionista bodies. Model Muse and Pivotal bodies are almost only used for higher-priced collector dolls.

wow those new care bears are so sexy!

I think the critique of Barbie is misplaced (honestly, I think the critique is misplaced in general and more based on nostalgic rage than anything else, but especially Barbie).  Yes, the new Barbie is less androgynous, but that is because the new Barbie actually tries to mimic the proportions of a real woman.  Fair, that woman is idealized (more similar to a model or actress than an "average" woman) and the proportions are off because she is a doll (a realistically proportioned doll is creepy), but I'd rather see an idealized woman who bears resemblance to real women than an idealized woman who is beyond just "impossible to attain."  Barbie's draw from the start was that, unlike other dolls that were highly stylized, she was supposed to be a fairly realistic (in comparison to other dolls) representation of an adult woman.  Other dolls were usually highly stylized representations of children, and occasionally adult women.  Some women do have arched backs, round butts, small waists, and large breasts like new Barbie.  Not many, but a few.  But the previous Barbie is way more extreme than simply being busty with a small waist.  Her waist is impossibly small, while her "rib cage" and breasts are impossibly large, even by the standards of a doll.  Barbie was never supposed to be androgynous and was always supposed to be sexy, so why not a somewhat more realistic interpretation of a woman?

Not a sociological insight by any means, but I like some of the updated versions on the Pinterest page just as much as the old versions, if not more so.  The updated Trollz are hilarious, I want to hug whoever took the old prototype and came up with THAT.  

Forget sexy, I wonder why if any sociologists have complained that the new Trollz glorify going to raves and partaking in hallucinogenic drugs.

My Little Pony has undergone this transformation as well, becoming more flirty & streamlined a la Carebears.

What caught my eye about Barbi are the breasts -- they are much more pseudo-realistic in shape, or maybe just more defined as breasts. This probably reflects a difference between what was considered attractive at Barbi's inception (the 1950s bullet breasts) vs what is considered attractive now (pert and braless - via implants if necessary, hence the pseudo). In any case, it serves to further sexualize it because the Barbi bullet breasts served to make Barbi look like a woman when dressed, the pseudo-realistic breasts serve to make Barbi look like a woman when naked, adding nothing when clothed.

*This* is girl power:

http://games.crossfit.com/video/lindsey-valenzuelas-108-snatches

The Care Bears are still pretty androgynous. If you don't look at the eyes, you can't tell that one of those shown is a boy.

The new Barbie is a step in the right direction and was likely a response, at least in part, to criticisms over how unrealistic the proportions of the old one were. 

The new one may have a body type only possessed by a small percentage of women, but the old one had a body type possessed by no woman who has ever walked the Earth.

I'm honestly trying to see the problem here, but I'm failing.  Toys get updated all the time.  Try comparing a 1990s or 1980s Barbie to an original one.  Other than being female fashion dolls, they look really, really different.  (And, sure, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about Barbie dolls, but I don't think her updated look is anything new.  Barbie has always had a ridiculously idealized body)

I don't agree with 'sexy' as a good word to describe the other updated characters.  They're just being changed to adhere to a more modern aesthetic.  Even though I'm creeped out by the truly gigantic eyes that seem to be in vogue nowadays, I'm not a huge fan of that 1980s country-cute look either.  

Honestly, I think many (although not all) of the characters linked to at the Pinterest board look better as their modern incarnations.  The old style Holly Hobbie is wearing a big, cumbersome country dress and bonnet.  The new one looks like she can actually run around and play like a normal kid.  The new Care Bears seem to have individual personalities (I say this as a kid who was obsessed with the old care bears of the 80s), and I'm not sure how they could possibly be called 'sexy.'  As for the ever-controversial "Lego Friends", while a lot of the new figures are engaged in stereotypically feminine activities, there is nothing wrong with stereotypically feminine activities.  Furthermore, I think it's fantastic that at least one of the new Lego figures comes with a science lab playset.  I notice she's conspicuously absent from the Pinterest lineup.  And, sure, she's an exception, but I think she's a significant one.  I would have really, really, really loved to own toy figures of girls doing science-y things when I was a kid, but they simply did not exist during my childhood.

I think if we're considering sexualization, it's misleading to juxtapose Barbie - a toy which represents an adult of sexually viable age - with toys representing children or non-human characters.

The key difference with Barbie is that it has always been a surrogate for children's imagination of the adult world, which most certainly includes some notion of sex. To deny this would require both having never observed children and having never been one. Barbie is simply a better fit for the occasionally sexualized narratives of preadolescent play than its childlike predecessors, and its adaptability to sexual mores and fashion norms is, for better or worse, essential to its success.  

The same can not really be said of Care Bears, Polly Pocket, or Dora the Explorer, so what we're seeing there is probably a rather different trend. I suspect it has something to do with the goldmine that Disney unearthed in recent years with packaging teenage-themed entertainment for kindergarteners. Six-year-olds seem to relate more strongly to characterizations of older, pubescent kids in 2012 than they did in 1992 or 2002. With that in mind, it would follow that toys and characters aimed at that age group are going through a plastic puberty of their own.

I liked the 90s barbie almost because she was so exaggerated as a child it was obvious it was nothing one would think to aspire to look like. It was almost an uncanny valley awkward incarnation of what should be a fully dressed woman unclothed. The newer barbies do bear a lot more resemblance to actual women(particularly fit popstars and the like), and in that I think pose a more danger because it's no longer as much of a caricature.

The new Barbie has smaller boobs, a bigger bum and thicker waist. I was pleasantly surprised at the change between my Barbies and my daughter's. There are also far more skin and hair types represented.  I don't think Barbie can be criticised for moving in the wrong direction - maybe not enough has been done but I think the changes have been positive, not negative.

I thought they made the Polly Pockets bigger because there would be less risk of kids accidentally swallowing them... but I see I have been mistaken. 

I know this is a bit of an old topic, but i wanted to point out that your picture of the original Polly Pocket doesn't actually contain a picture of the doll herself, she looked like this:
http://i-love-my-80s-toys.tressugar.com/Polly-Pocket-390292 

She didn't look like an infant, but she did look younger than the doll does now

I actually think the 'new Barbie' looks a lot less sexualized than the old one.  Smaller boobs, thicker waist, just generally more humanly-attainable.  Yeah, she's still an idealized womanly figure, but that's nothing new.  The other two I just find kinda creepy - I wonder if they're trying to appeal to the preteen crowd, instead of the preschool/early grade school crowd they used to have?

Commenting here as a professional animator who ADORED the Care Bears in the late 80s/early 90s: the new designs surprised me initially, but my honest first thought was "that'd be a hell of a lot easier to animate!" They've been simplified and further anthropomorphised hem, going more towards a human figure than every beginning animator's most hated exercise, the half-full sack of flour. Plus, back then it would have all been hand-drawn, whereas now Flash animation is much more common (where essentially the characters work like stretchy marionettes), and the new designs would work MUCH better in this. Not saying I like the redesign particularly - especially the more gender binary basis on the characters - but it makes the job of getting something kids enjoy onto screen a lot easier and quicker.

Incidentally, at the same sort of time as Care Bears were a big issue in my life, I used to find Barbie's anatomy really freaky. Something to do with how her hips and legs attached together. (Maybe I was a strange little girl?) The modern one at least looks vaguely human, even if hugely idealised. I'm not saying that if I had a daughter I'd want her to play with Barbie ... but I think I'd prefer it if it wasn't the same doll that I found so creepy when I was little.

Fertile shapes have been usurped by nubile ones.

I'm...really baffled at the comments about the Barbie. The old one looks far more natural to me than the new, prepubescent one. They're both cartoonish caricatures, of course, but I have no idea how arching Barbie's back and an ever-so slight thickening of the waist is an improvement.

Elimination of the extreme *proportions* are what's being lauded, despite the fact that this was done by GETTING RID OF HER RIB CAGE.

Barbie's body is a common topic of conversation- I think it'd be fascinating to have an examination of how her FACE has been changed- the pouty, heavily-eyelined face of yesteryear has been replaced with the white eye-shadowed, bright-n-bushytailed nubile mask- I think this is extremely-relevant to examining the ever-growing trend from sexualizing mature women to more and more prepubescent ones.

No idea why this wasn't included originally, but here is the front view of Barbie, old and new.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nuwandalice/2591453378/

No idea why this wasn't included originally, but here is the front view of Barbie, old and new.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nuwandalice/2591453378/

Barbie's body is a common topic of conversation- I think it'd be fascinating to have an examination of how her FACE has been changed:

The heavily-eyelined, blue eyeshadowed face of yesteryear has been replaced with the pink-shadowed, bright-n-bushytailed teen mask. This is extremely-relevant to examining the ever-growing trend from sexualizing mature women toward increasingly-prepubescent ones, and the underlying evolution of women's sexual oppression from extreme inaccessibility to extreme ACCESSIBILITY; "prude" is the new "slut" of sexual shaming. Replacing the vampy-allure with nubile up-for-anythingness, the cat eyes have morphed into dazzlingly-empty blue saucers, the extremely-arched brows into far more friendly-looking ones, the scarlet pout into a wide and pink-lipped grin. Can you imagine a modern Barbie whose gaze is a sly glance to the side? That's to say nothing of the changes in skin color (though a lot of that has to do with the evolving aesthetics of classism, I realize).

The overall expression has evolved from that of a highly-discriminating chooser to one hoping to be chosen- cultural reactionism to women's economic independence and birth control availability, which enabled them for the first time to be discriminating toward potential male partners. A la Naomi Wolf, unprecedented surges in legal and political power exact a proportional amount of cultural backlash, hence the need to recast the ideal sexual feminine from womanly/fertile to girly/vulnerable.

What's most interesting is a popular trope of criticizing the old cosmetically-achieved extreme emphasis of fertility- the red lips, for instance (alongside the extreme hourglass shape),
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UZ4w5WmbI9Y/S9_-opRC-jI/AAAAAAAACFo/NhSLH-7ml1U/s1600/p734412.jpg

and failing to indict the NEW cosmetically-achieved extreme emphasis of YOUTH- rosy pink washing.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9Z9Hsy423eg/TNMSQOECkgI/AAAAAAAAAIo/JgmW9z40ook/s1600/barbie.jpg

A Victoria's Secret ad of the last few years, with model's bodies juxtaposed alongside the words "WHAT IS SEXY?" comes to mind. ANSWER: Whatever reinforces prevailing sexual norms and the politics therein.

I fully-expect this analysis to be herp-derped into oblivion by those oblivious to how cultural and aesthetic trends act and react in accordance with political ones.

Care bears?!?!?!?!?!?!?!????????!!!!!!!!!!!