TinkerBell

This is definitely an unusual choice – not because it is unusual for me to enjoy things made for children – but because it is very very unusual for me to enjoy anything made by Disney (apart from Fantasia and some of the early cartoons, of course.). I have always viewed the Disney brand name as a kind of Hand-of-Death whose touch would whither sensitivity and good taste and induce intolerable levels of slap-stick cheesiness and saccharin sentimentality. There is a certain kind of heavily over-done voice-acting which seems to ooze out of the depths of adult patronisation of children.... and badly drawn animals that just always have to have exaggeratedly American accents – and "larger-than-life" personalities.
So I was very pleasantly surprised when only two of the voice actors in this film made me squirm and wince. They are the proverbial dumb-ass fall-guys of all the really bad jokes about the overweight and those with glasses. In spite of this I really loved watching this and re-watched bits of it for the sheer pleasure of seeing the meticulous detail with which every object and surface and texture had been rendered. Admittedly some of the yellows were just a bit too, well … yellow and there were some horridly lurid skies, but most of it was very sensitive and truly magical. I think the greatest thing about it was that there were no talking animals. The creatures in the film were not it's strong point and I think this comes from a long tradition of hack-handed animation artists trying to do “Walt Disney”. If they would only spend some time looking at nature and less time watching tv! I think the problem, is that there is no such thing as a talking animal in nature, so they fall back on hackneyed clichés about cutesy-piedness and guffawing hilarity. Having human models to draw on, and everyday familiarity with human faces, means that the creators and animators of the fairies in TinkerBell were able to give great detail and subtle realism to every nuance of facial expression. This means that you really believe in them as the characters they are meant to represent. And the rest of the voice actors are really good ones and include some well known voice, film and TV actors such as Lucy Liu. The story is only very loosely based on J.M. Barrie's Neverland, it is about TnkerBell's pre-Peter Pan epoch and is about the role of fairies in nature and the changing of the seasons. It is definitely a very girly film and a feel-good bit of escapism. It is a joy to look at (most of the time) and certainly very enjoyable to watch (most of the time) if you happen to like flowers and fairies and that sort of thing. It is a straight-to-DVD film and it's a pity such good art-work and animation are somewhat spoiled by their association with the whole cheesy theme-park ride that is the Disney franchise.