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! 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 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. 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. Same general thrust, but very different take on Lizzy, and the first half or so of the trailer is unfamiliar.
Secret of the Wings (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. 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!--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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loginIt'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~
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