I watched this movie a lot as a kid, so I don't think I have it in me to hate it, especially since it's clearly not trying to live up to the original film. But I re-watched it for the first time in years recently, and I have to say, I've never in my life laughed so hard just from watching a film.
The story is very simple. Wilbur has gone back to his normal life on the farm alongside Charlotte's three daughters - the bold and adventurous Nellie, the cautious worrywart Aranea, and the cynical, ironically-named Joy. When spring comes, he ends up befriending a newborn black sheep after everyone else on the farm mocks him for being different. After the sheep, named Cardigan, is sold to another farmer, Wilbur sets out to visit him and make sure he's doing alright, but ends up being mistaken for a wild pig after a fox makes off with some of the other farm's livestock. Bound by a promise he made to stay with Cardigan until his wool is shorn (yeah, that's really why he can't just leave and go back home), Wilbur has to find a way to prove his innocence before the gaggle of angry farmers hunts him down.
The relationship between Wilbur and Cardigan is one of the weirdest parts of the film - for starters, Wilbur spends the first twenty minutes teaching Cardigan to act like a pig, and none of the human characters ever take issue with this, even as Cardigan takes part in things like eating Wilbur's pig slop. I get that it's supposed to be heartwarming or something, but why not just have Cardigan act like a normal sheep while still being friends with Wilbur? One of the things I happen to remember about the original story was how Wilbur grew to like Charlotte in spite of the ways in which she was different from him, like her unsettling, albeit natural thirst for blood. I don't think they were deliberately trying to go against that moral here by having Cardigan be just like Wilbur instead - it was just a weird choice that wasn't completely thought through, I'm guessing.
There are also a lot of times where Wilbur and Cardigan sleep next to each other and cuddle together or nuzzle each other's noses...Rewatching it, I briefly found myself wondering if Cardigan was supposed to be a female. (As far as I know, he's not.)
But while the film had some...odd moments, it demonstrated some competence, too. I think the best parts of it were when it focused on Charlotte's daughters. The three of them get a subplot about trying to live up to their mother's legacy, complete with a song number as they try to spell out Wilbur's innocence in their web. Even as an adult, I found them to be pretty endearing as characters and I was sort of invested in their arc, and I wish more of the film's running time had been devoted to them. (Though this investment did make their subplot's payoff a little disappointing for me -- without giving too much away, the girls eventually manage to convey the truth about the situation to the human characters, but a few minutes later, it's revealed that a key piece of evidence was sitting just a few inches away during the entire scene, so the truth probably would've come out whether the spiders had been there or not.)
The film had a lot of songs sprinkled throughout, by the way -- many of them were fairly pointless, but I give credit that at least the tunes were a little catchy. The voice acting was alright, and there was a surprising amount of intentional humor that managed to hit its mark. Apart from the three spiders, one other character I was fond of was this sassy cow with a milk problem that Wilbur meets at one point; she turns out to be a lot like Templeton, in that she lays out the harsh truths of the situation the heroes are in and calls them out when they make stupid decisions and stuff. She didn't need to be in the film at all, but for a side character, she was surprisingly likable and contributed to a good deal of the comedy.
And the animation, particularly the backgrounds, always struck me as quite impressive for what the movie is -- whether it's during Wilbur's happy days on the farm or while he's running for his life from the farmers and their dogs, the visuals did a good job of drawing me into the events of the story and are probably one of the few soft spots I still have from this old childhood memory.
Even without the effect of slight nostalgia (and believe you me, it is very slight), I don't regard this movie as all that terrible, even if I'm comparing it to the legacy of its predecessor -- as general direct-to-video kids' movies go, it's just an innocent, slightly dumb, but cute little film to hold their attention. The only questionable thing about it is the whole "you should teach your friends to act exactly like you instead of embracing their own unique differences" thing with Wilbur and Cardigan, and even that isn't something I'd expect kids to think into that much. Overall, I consider it a harmless story whether a follow-up to the original or not.
One last thing I neglected to mention is the movie's villain; a fox who attacks both farms Wilbur is at throughout the film and is responsible for the aforementioned framing of him. I didn't explore him in detail in this review because there isn't more to him than what you would expect from a villainous fox character in a movie about farm animals. He's there, he does fine, he gets a pointless song, and I like his voice. Make of that what you will.
