ANI-MOVIES, *Tinkerbell

Where as most Disney's direct-to-video followups to their feature films are rarely treated with any real care, this prequal to the original Peter Pan animated movie was actually pretty good. Tinker Bell was first put together mainly as a vehicle for the Disney Fairies product line which includes Tink and several other original fairy characters. This was mostly a response to several other shows that were out at the time like Winx Club and W.I.T.C.H. which featured teenage girls who transformed into fairies(which on their own were semi-ripoffs of Sailor Moon). It's a step up from the other Disney movie prequals/midquals/sequals to as it was the first one to be done in digital 3D.

This is essentially Tink's origin story. She is "born" from the laugh of a baby and first appears in the fairy home of Pixie Hollow which is part of Neverland. She is greeted by the other fairies, and learns that every one of them has a specific talent that is categorized into different types(water, animal, light, etc.). Tinker Bell is classified as a tinker fairy whose job it is to create and fix tools for the other fairies. At first she doesn't seem to mind it, but after meeting the spiteful garden fairy Vidia, she is told that tinkers aren't allowed to go to the mainland as only the nature fairies are sent to prepare the rest of the world for each season. Determined to prove that she's more than just a tinker, she tries to learn the nature magic skills from some of the other fairies. She fortunately has gained many quick friends, each one with their own type of power, but unfortunately its a power each one is born with and can't be learned. While begging Vidia for trying to learn her skill, she cons Tink into collecting runaway thistles, which end up wrecking most of Pixie Hollow and the fairies' plans for the changing of winter to spring. Mulling over the mistakes she's made, Tink uses her tinker skills to quickly craft some tools that will help repair all the damage she caused, which also increases the production of the fairies' season changing. Tink is then allowed to go to London with the rest of the fairies acting as a finder of lost treasures for humans, where she delivers a music box she fixed to a certain young girl(that she tries to have killed at least twice later on!).

I have to say I was pleasantly suprised by this when I caught on in TV. The story was good, and even though it was intended for younger girls, it wasn't done with a bunch of fairies singing ridiculous songs every five minutes, and going on about chocolate and boys. It also isn't some sappy romance where Tink is trying to find her token "Prince Charming" like other Disney heroines, although she does develop a small friendship with one of the boy fairies that's covered more in the sequal, Tinker Bell And The Lost Treasure. The only problem I felt was I don't see where Tink goes from being only slightly agitated from time-to-time, to being the full blown vidictively jealous boy-stalker that we see in Peter Pan. No mention of Pan or Capt. Hook is mentioned in this, but there are at least three more sequals being planned, all of which supposedly take place before Peter Pan. The computer animation in this is also exceptional, considering its not done by Pixar. The vocal cast is pretty impessive too with Anjelica Houston, Raven-Simone, America Ferrera, and Lucy Liu doing most of the fairy regulars, and Mae Whitman is suprisingly good as Tink considering this is the first time she ever talks in a movie. Your daughters or nieces should enjoy this as a nice gift, and worth watching on your own if you're a regular Disneyphile.