It's one of the few times it ever actually worked. It had a strong emotional core, but it also directly tied to the movie's theme of childhood innocence. It felt earned.
It's still a huge cop-out. Sorry, but I hate it when movies bring back characters from the dead, especially when it's only just moments after they die. It ruins the tension, and it makes the emotional moment unearned.
I liked how the Japanese dub actually had themes of existentialism and Mewtwo as morally ambiguous, but when 4Kids got their hands on it, the writers took out all of the nuance and made the conflict black and white and added in some half-assed "violence is bad" message, because they thought kids were too stupid to understand what would happen.
Technically, Inspector Gadget had the song first, so I'd say Rupert Everett changed was the main influencer for Shrek. Only fitting the movies he was in were the highest-grossing in the franchise.
They're all still working. Rob Paulsen voiced Donatello in the recent Nickelodeon TMNT series and will be the voice director for the upcoming one later this fall, Tress MacNeille's still voicing Daisy Duck and several Simpsons characters, and Jess Harnell's doing a lot of stuff from a bunch of different cartoons.
From what I remember, the Digimon show was better than Pokemon. The characters in that show actually had arcs and backstories and things actually happened and developed. There wasn't some BS like Ash got in every season where he loses the big tournament and has to start all over in a new region.