The Pirate Fairy review: Disney tinkers with feminine archetypes in Peter Pan spin-off



This was published 7 years ago


Disney's Tinkerbell films are poor relations to the studio's more lavish animated features, but they're becoming slyer and more interesting on their own terms.

By Jake Wilson

While Disney's cheaply made Tinkerbell films have none of the cultural cachet of more lavish animated features, they're getting slyer and more interesting on their own terms. Tink herself, voiced by Mae Whitman, still looks like a winged Barbie doll, but the scripts are all about tweaking our expectations of her ultra-feminine persona: even the name “Tinker” is meant to be taken literally, as a reference to her mechanical gifts.

The last instalment in the series was Secret of the Wings, a rather daring Romeo and Juliet story centred on Tink's taboo bond with Periwinkle (Lucy Hale), her newfound sister from the wrong side of Pixie Hollow. Rebellion takes a different course in The Pirate Fairy, in which the title character, Zarina (Christina Hendricks), is introduced as a feisty assembly-line worker with a deep scientific curiosity about the properties of blue pixie dust.

Whatever you're thinking here, it's likely the filmmakers are way ahead of you: after an illegal experiment leads to Zarina losing her job, she breaks bad on a larger scale, becoming captain of a pirate ship on Neverland's high seas.

These days the familiar realm of Disney fairytale serves as a designated safe space, where mainstream filmmakers can explore questions of “proper” female behaviour without getting into trouble. The Pirate Fairy joins Frozen and the live-action Maleficent in a cycle of Disney movies about unruly women who are neither conventional heroines nor mere villains.

What's especially striking in this case is the determination to have things both ways. Even Tink disapproves of Zarina, who is clearly destined to get her comeuppance. Yet the film rests on the assumption that the spectacle of a six-inch fairy giving orders to a band of full-size ruffians – including a handsome young scallywag voiced by Tom Hiddleston – is, regardless of context, supercool.

A similar kind of doublethink is present in the depiction of Pixie Hollow as both a timeless, idyllic fantasy land and a conservative society where fairies are kept in their place, allowing us to sympathise with Zarina even if we can't approve. It may not be wholly fair to see this as a reflection of how it feels to work at Disney; still, it's worth noting that director Peggy Holmes is the first woman at the studio to be given sole credit for a theatrically released animated feature. Things keep moving forward, even in the Magic Kingdom.

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