Tags
Beast, Blu, Disney, DisneyToon, dvd, Fairies, Fawn, gruff, legend, movie, Never, NeverBeast, Peter Pan, Ray, review, sixth, Tinker Bell
The Sixth Entry to the Popular Series Goes Back to its Roots
When looking at Disney’s Tinker Bell series as a single body of work, many themes and patterns begin to surface, revealing hints into the mindset of the developers. First they went the way of the seasons, delivering four climate-fueled adventures. Once that angle had been exhausted, it seems the move has been made to focus on individual fairies per film. Given one look at the cast of characters Disney has to work with here and it becomes clear this could be a very, very long series indeed.
That being said, in this case animal lover fairy Fawn gets the spotlight in a tale that alternates between present day activities and a myth from deep fairy lore that seems to be coming to pass all around the residents of Pixie Hollow.
Before getting into the story itself, let’s take a look at the performance of the film via some hard numbers. Released domestically as a direct-to-DVD affair in March of 2015, Legend of the Neverbeast bears the distinction of being the most recent entry to the franchise at the time of this review’s writing. Disney has confirmed that a seventh entry was underway to follow this one but had been canceled due to story issues.
Disney has been very quiet about the operating budget on the piece but there is little reason to suspect it would be too far off the average mark of the five films in the franchise that preceded it; $35-million a pop. If this is accurate, a UK theatrical run nearly recovered the budget (taking in $31.2-million at the box office) even before any domestic release activity. This leads one to suspect that the project was lucrative financially though a lack of confirmed profits and yet still no announcement on that canceled follow-up film don’t bode well.
Back to the movie at hand, titular character Tinker Bell finds herself relegated to supporting cast status this time around as Steve Loter’s animated saga instead focuses its attention on Fawn’s (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) love for the critters of the forest- yes even those who are terrible threats to fairy-folk like hawks and mythical monsters.
When the arrival of a strange comet spurs the awakening of an animal that’s equal parts armadillo, opossum and monster of the Maurice Sendak’s “Wild Things” variety, Fawn finds herself on the sneak tip while an elite fairy security team (who are admittedly cool in so sterile a mythos) do what they can to locate and nullify the threat.
While previous entries of the franchise seemed to be inching ever-closer to linking the Pixie Hollow universe to the Peter Pan series that spawned the character of Tinker Bell, NeverBeast seems to have taken a deliberate step back and to instead give fans something closer to the type of fantasy-driven lesson about judging a book by its cover in the tradition of How to Train Your Dragon.
All in all the formula works. There are times this series as a whole feels as though its struggling to find its niche’ but NeverBeast accomplishes what it sets out to do fairly well. With a 76-minute run-time and pacing that comes together nicely by the end (the beginning drags out a bit), kids will surely enjoy the romp despite a fairly melancholic ending.
While the fate of the franchise itself is yet uncertain, Legend of the NeverBeast leaves its viewer satisfied with the knowledge that Pixie Hollow itself is safe and in good hands should Disney decide to pay it a revisit in the future.