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It disappointed me more than words can say when I finally put this DVD in the machine only to be greeted by a trailer for “Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure”, to be released in 2009. Don’t get me wrong, I knew ahead of time that the intention was to produce more than one of these, that it’s as much about the whole Disney Fairies realm as it is about Tinker Bell on her lonesome – but somehow, having the trailer for the next installment (literally, if you count on the questionable “Disney FastPlay” feature on the DVD – tell me, how does having a small featurette explaining FastPlay on all these discs speed your access to the movie, lol?) flow into the feature presentation brings to the fore the fact that this 75 minute straight-to-video production just isn’t as standalone and definitive as the title suggests it should be.
That’s the feeling that, kind of like the hokey set-up in Blindness, hindered my enjoyment of this thing the most. It is beautifully designed, if perhaps not so well animated (some of the characters movements struck me as very game-like) – the colour and light are just about worth taking the 75 minutes to take in and if I said, “… for a straight-to-video movie” in my Little Mermaid 3 review then I ought to give this production the same liberty – compared to some of the arse that Disney produced in the nineties, there’s an argument to be made that they’re moving in the right direction. That said, I’m beginning to wonder if Disney are fully aware of this ‘excuse’ and the fact is that they could still do better.
The problem with this movie is that, much like Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which I watched again this past Halloween but didn’t review again; for the record, I loved it second time around but for what I’m about to say) wasn’t a Halloween movie, this isn’t a Tinker Bell movie. Not Disney’s Tinker Bell, of Peter Pan fame, any way. The character is entirely changed. The CG can be as beautifully rendered as it likes but it still demands that the very design of the character is altered. Disney deserve kudos in the current “don’t mix sex n kids” climate for showing so much Fairy flesh as they do, remembering how sexual Tink was in the original Peter Pan; but even this is not enough to blind me to the fact that the Tink in this production is not the Tinker Bell. I know how ridiculous this sounds to a lot of people, but I kinda think it’s important. If they’d called this “Tinker Bell and the fill in the blank“ like the sequels look to be titled, I mightn’t be so picky and disappointed … but when you use such a definitive title as this, you’ve gotta earn it, and in these 75 minutes, bluntly, Disney don’t.