In 2005, Gail Carson Levine (author of Ella Enchanted) wrote Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg, a reimagining of the Tinker Bell character from Peter Pan designed to flesh out Tink's life and give her a world ("Pixie Hollow" in Neverland) and friends of her own kind. Not unlike G4 ponies with their cutie marks, fairies are sorted based on their special talents, which can range from the broad (water talent, cooking talent) to the extremely specific (tall-tale-telling talent, specific-room-cleaning talent) as required for any given story. Tinker Bell herself is a tinker talent, an all-purpose engineer who specializes in invention. Like a much-expanded version of the G4 pegasi, fairies are in charge of maintaining nature in the human world, and even when they're not actively changing the seasons, they're hard at work practicing their jobs and getting ready for the next season and the like.
Gail Carson Levine wrote two more books in the series, starring many of the same characters in exciting adventure stories, such as Mother Dove, the loving matron of all the fairies, and Beck, her animal talent caretaker. Rani the water talent fairy gets the most abuse; not only is she very emotional (as a water talent, she's very prone to crying and sniffling and the like), but she has to cut off her wings (making her the only fairy who can swim) and she ends up with a bat living inside of her brain. Other authors wrote books too, as the series was expanded into the full Disney Fairies franchise, with dolls and other toys of the various characters available in major stores, comic book adaptations of the book stories, and so on.
In 2008, Disney released the first animated movie in the series, simply titled "Tinker Bell." Similar to G3's transformation into G3.5, the film abandoned most of the previous main characters of the franchise--except for Tinker Bell herself and her rival Vidia the fast-flying fairy--and replaced them with other fairies with simpler designs (seen above) who had been minor characters at best. Queen Clarion became the fairies' ultimate authority figure after playing second fiddle to Mother Dove (and usually nicknamed Queen Ree) in the books. Some of the discrepancies are explainable by time period--the films are set before the events of Peter Pan, while Levine's books are definitely set after--but the absence of Mother Dove in particular is bizarre. It's probably easiest not to try to connect them into a single continuity at all.
Tinker Bell and her film friends show all the standard traits for a children's cartoon. They're clearly color coded (Vidia, not pictured above, is purple), have distinct personalities and races or at least hair colors (Asian Silvermist, Hispanic Fawn, southern Rosetta...), have non-overlapping skills, and are all good friends. Except for Vidia, who spends the first three movies getting over her initial dislike of Tinker Bell and her unfamiliarity with the idea of having friends at all. Your winged Sunset Shimmer, if you will.
Animated Disney Fairies is up to five main movies (Tinker Bell, The Lost Treasure, The Great Fairy Rescue, Secret of the Wings, and The Pirate Fairy), plus a twenty-minute special (Pixie Hollow Games) and a six-minute one (Pixie Hollow Bake-Off). In all but one of the main movies, all of Pixie Hollow is in danger of being destroyed forever, which is pretty impressive. Usually it's Tinker Bell herself's fault, too! There are also a whole bunch of animated shorts, some but not all clearly connected to whatever movie was next to come out at the time, which tend to be about a minute long and are more in the slice of life vein, sometimes without any dialogue. Tinker Bell is always the main character of the full-length movies, but in the shorts (and in Pixie Hollow Games) she's just one of the girls.
Here's a taste! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln_DY8lytfg) I like this one for how much it manages to say about each of the girls' personalities just through the simple act of catching a thrown seed.
Here's another (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXqufUkz6N4) that's not particularly great, but it does a good job of showing Tinker Bell's STEM nature. A later character, Zarina, is some sort of fantastic biochemist (and an amazing queer analogue I mean oh my god).
The Tinker Bell movies have been said to be somewhere between cinema-release quality and direct-to-DVD quality, and that's pretty fair. I think they're better made than Equestria Girls (except for the songs--the Tink films have solid background music but not-so-great pop songs) but not at the level of a full Frozen. To be fair, they've been released all but annually. Animation styles are naturally subjective, but I like them better than some of the more stylized movies out there, though the lower budget does sometimes show through when the camera pulls back too far and you see a big field or forest where everything looks exactly the same. There's almost always some amount of pixie dust on screen and it's always shiny and beautiful.
One fascinating thing about the Fairies movies is how much revision they go through in development, to the point where it's normal for them to get first trailers containing barely any footage that ends up being in the final films. Also radical plot divergences. Spoilered because less general interest:
Spoiler
Tinker Bell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0CTqqTkXH8). This movie was famously thrown out during production for being "unwatchable"--I'm not sure if that's what we're seeing here, because the main characters are the same, but it's definitely very different from the final release. Wendy Darling gets a much larger role and it seems closer to the grounds Great Fairy Rescue would cover a couple years later. And maybe the pixie dust tree was going to move to the mainland? Some of that footage got released in shorts, but everything from Tink's first appearance on is a big unknown.
Great Fairy Rescue (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1B7dGlmres). Same general thrust, but very different take on Lizzy, and the first half or so of the trailer is unfamiliar.
Secret of the Wings (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqDNR3rzfGM) (aka Mysterious Winter Woods). The story looks like it was much more ensemble-oriented at this point (the final film is nothing but Tink (and Periwinkle) most of the time), and while warm fairy wings not working in the winter woods ended up being a major plot point, there'd nothing of that here at all. I can't tell if this would have been before or after Peri was decided to be Tink's sister.
Pixie Hollow Games (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUfDvKVAc5o). Not exactly a trailer in the same way as the others, but you can see some footage of events that never made it into the final. PHG in particular seems to have gone through a ridiculous amount of direction changes, ending up as a twenty-minute special instead of a full film, with very little promotional material mentioning that it's about Rosetta and barely anyone else.
The easiest criticism of the series is that Tinker Bell doesn't act like she did in Peter Pan. Some of that is attributable to the timeframe--Tink in Levine's books is grouchier than she is in the movies--but ultimately yeah, that's just something you have to accept. Disney wanted a likable protagonist. She still gets angry and can be kind of snippy, but she's toned down. Characters sometimes go missing (Terence, Tink's ostensible love interest, has barely appeared in the movies since starring in Lost Treasure and is totally absent from the shorts). Pants are not nearly as common as short skirts. All the predictable concerns about body type apply here too (though not as dramatically as in, say, Winx Club): all the main characters are young and beautiful, except for the boys, who are allowed an actual variety of body types. But the one larger woman (Fairy Mary, an authority figure) is treated with nothing but respect and affection, and everyone gets their share of physical comedy.
But personally I'm willing to look past that, because the fairies have strong friendships and real responsibilities (of varying relatability to the real world--again, Tink and Zarina are wonderful STEM ladies, but it's hard to find work pointing sun rays at flowers) and distinct personalities, and that's all something worth supporting. The movies pit them against big world-changing problems, not stolen cupcakes. Secret of the Wings (coincidentally?) does the same thing as megahit Frozen of taking a romance plot and applying it to a pair of sisters instead. Also, they're all really cute, so that helps.
It's 2014, though, and the Disney Fairies franchise is winding down. This isn't the first time it's been warned about, but now it looks like it's going to happen for real. There haven't been any new books in a few years, and the magazine stopped a while back. Browser-based MMO game Pixie Hollow shut down just about a year ago and there are no indications it will return. Fairy features at Disneyland and the like have been removed... I think there's still a Tinkerbell greeting kids in some other area, but her friends are all gone. There aren't too many fairy dolls in the toy stores anymore, though the ones that are there are mostly lovely and too expensive and also I have misgivings about the quality of their faces. And so the next movie, Legend of the Neverbeast--teaser trailer! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkNKE2u0qJI)--is scheduled to be the last... much to the surprise of the animation studio when they got the news, since they were working on several planned later movies at the time.
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(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkNKE2u0qJI)
It's about Fawn the animal fairy--and also Tinker Bell, of course, but all the main movies but the first highlight a second character besides her, and this time it's Fawn's turn. Fawn's kind of my favorite, so that works out, but I'll be sad to see them go... conceivably big merchandise profits could turn things around as they have in the past, but Pirate Fairy was a great movie and had solid toy designs and starred the dude who played Loki in The Avengers, and if all that couldn't save the franchise, I don't think Fawn and a Neverbeast have a chance.
Ah well. There is and will continue to be other stuff for girls out there.
But this is the internet. Nothing ever truly dies, particularly not when so much of the franchise is those freely available animated shorts. So... sit here and believe in fairies with me? Look forward to the last film? Wonder what could have been? Talk about how sweet Silvermist is? Talk about the books, which I mostly left out of this post because I've only read Levine's and none of the others? Show me pretty dolls, because this is a collectors forum?
~faith, trust, and pixie dust~
So Legend of the Neverbeast leaked to the interwebs sometime last week, and it turned out I was too weak to wait any longer. :# So, on with the spoiler tags...
Spoiler
Pirate Fairy was better.
Beyond that I'm not sure yet. I'd need to watch it again to get a better sense of how I'd rank it relative to the rest, but Pirate Fairy hit so many right notes and Neverbeast falls short of that. The problem I felt while watching it is that it sacrifices the ensemble nature of the fairy cast. Inasmuch as that meant making Tinkerbell not the main character, and in fact a distant second (or third if you count Gruff), that was really cool. But inasmuch as that meant many long sequences with Fawn and only Fawn, and the other girls not getting much more dialogue than needed to assure us that yes, the writers didn't forget which one is which... that part I was less excited about. What intercharacter moments there were, worked well (<3 Silvermist!), but there just weren't enough of them for my tastes.
But! I'm not saying I didn't like the movie. The scout fairies' outfits are gorgeous, and I wish we got to know more about them beyond their leader because they have some really pretty character designs too. All the stuff with the baby hawk before Gruff finally appears worked really well, setting up both Fawn's conflicts both external (Nyx) and internal in a way that felt completely organic. The series' running theme of all Pixie Hollow being on the brink of destruction because of the main character's actions was maintained and maintained perfectly. Some of the action sequences looked really good (especially the climax and some of the scout fairy stuff), and Fawn's antics were genuinely amusing/endearing. I enjoyed some of the character callbacks, though I felt the missing ones... I didn't expect any Zarina, but there was ample opportunity for Periwinkle, and I don't remember even a hint of Fairy Mary or the Ministers. Weird.
It's a thoroughly competent movie. It's got solid visuals, a straightforward plot with consistent characterization, and all sorts of plot twists you easily can see coming. If I had to sum up my complaint, it'd be that it doesn't feel like it needs to be a Disney Fairies movie specifically. Most of the existing cast doesn't get much to do, and there's very little discussion of fairies' role in changing the seasons and so on. There's just wings and pixie dust. And those are both fine, but I feel the movie should have been aimed more toward the franchise's most distinctive features, the ones it's put in time to build up over the years. At least have Tink and the girls be drafted as volunteer scout fairies to sell dolls with movie-themed outfits.
Oh and I'd be remiss if I didn't say anything about the ending: it tore me apart. :( That definitely felt like a scene written after the studio had learned this would be the final movie in the series. That giant fluffy grumpy monster thing made an excellent audience surrogate and yes, I'll miss you too, girls. :(
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All from eBay, except for the Pirate Fairy set of standing figures, which came direct from Disney. The Fawn doll is probably temporary... I like her outfit well enough, but she doesn't have any wings and she's shorter than everyone else. Silvermist's outfit isn't very exciting and she's got one bent wing and one taped together, but none of the Silvermist dolls out there honestly do a very good job at capturing her facial structure anyway, so she'll probably stick around. Rosetta and Iridessa look amazing. Tink and Peri are just the low-priced TRU-exclusive set, but honestly they look fine except for Peri's pink shoes. I'm missing Zarina, Vidya, Chloe, and Spike (if there are other dolls, I don't know about them), but they promise to be a lot harder to find cheap copies of than the ones I've found so far...
LittleSpiffy:
Spoiler
I have no idea. On the one hand, nothing very bad ends up happening, because Gruff is able to stop the lightning after only a few things catch on fire. On the other, I don't think it's made clear why the lightning happens in the first place--well, because of the comet, I guess, but that just shifts the question one step farther back. So maybe the comet has multiple effects and the lightning is just the first, and later the volcano erupts as part of the same causally connected chain of events, but I really can't think of anything to suggest that is or is not the case.