When my friend first texted us, saying they were making a Winx Club live-action remake, we thought she was joking.
Growing up, we adored (and I mean adored) the show. We would pretend to be the fairies from the show almost every day at recess in elementary (yeah, I know; we weren’t the cool kids). So, hearing that they were making a live-action version 10+ years later was shocking, to say the least. And for me, a little bit of vindication, too. After all this time and all that jazz.
If you’ve never heard of Winx Club, I don’t blame you. It wasn’t really a “big show” in mainstream media. Winx Club is an Italian-American cartoon series created by Iginio Straffi. It was adapted for American audiences by Rainbow SpA Inc (now ViacomCBS), as well as RAI. Straffi only intended to write 3 seasons of the show (which he did), but due to popularity, wrote a 4th. After this, Straffi sold the rights to Nickelodeon in 2011 (so for all intents and purposes, this review will be a critique of Fate versus the first three *aka the good* seasons).
Winx Club is centered around the main protagonist, Bloom, who discovers she has magical powers and is a fairy. Together with her new friend, Stella, she makes her way to and enrolls in the Alfea College for Fairies. Soon, Bloom learns to hone her powers, and together with Stella and her suite-mates, Flora, Musa, Tecna, and eventually Aisha (Layla, for the 4kids viewers like moi), form the Winx Club.
Sounds like the perfect show for an 8-year-old kid, right?
So I think we were all hopeful this new version would be good. After all, it had a lot to live up to. And I mean, CGI, fashion, and casting have all developed so much since 2008. We were positive that the transformations, costumes, and the cast would be spot on. But we should’ve pocketed that hope, because boy, were we wrong.
The thing that we, and many fans, first complained about was that it was way too dark and way too intense. Wasn’t this based on a kid’s show? Wasn’t it supposed to be made of rainbows and unicorns? What was with the whole “dark academia” glare?
Aside from the perfect casting for Bloom:
(Seriously, it’s like looking in a mirror.)
The other cast choices were… well.
I mean, both the choices for Stella and Aisha were great, but the show was quickly accused of whitewashing two of its main characters: Terra (supposed to be Flora [which I was not happy about, but more on that later]) and Musa.
In the original show, Musa was of Asian descent and Flora of Hispanic descent. This was very obvious in their skin tones, and Straffi even said this was done on purpose so “teenagers from all over the world [could] identify themselves with the characters they think they are most like.”
As someone who is a POC themselves, it was amazing to see an Asian girl or a Latinx girl on television in 2007 when a lot of other shows didn’t offer that diversity. Obviously, this was taken away in Fate, and I (and my friends) were not happy.
(Also, side note, you see those transformation outfits in the cartoon? Where was that? It didn’t happen in Fate.)
Another problem was that the show had trouble sticking to the original storyline. I get it: every show wants to set themselves apart, and if they were based on something, not be a carbon copy. But Fate took it too far and seemed to remove itself from the narrative completely.
For one thing, we have the villain, Beatrix.
In the original show, there were a grand total of three villains: a group of witches who called themselves the Trix (Get it? Because they’re tricky? We love wordplay). They were the most awesome set of villains, and Netflix had the audacity to replace them with one girl? That’s a hard no from me.
Another issue was the Specialists, who are a group of heroes-in-training who help out the Winx Club.
In Fate, the Specialists are both men and women, which was great. That was probably one of the best changes they made from the original. But the problem was that they only included two from the main group of OG Specialists.
First was Stella’s character. In the cartoon, she was bubbly, perky, and friendly beyond belief. But in Fate, she was just a stone-cold bully. The writers seemed to make it so that her character fell into the trope of the traditional “Mean Girl”, posing as a minor antagonist for Bloom (who was supposed to be her best friend).
Moving on, we have Terra (or Flora, if you prefer). I mean, I loved that we got that plus-sized representation we lacked in the original with Terra. But aside from that, we can’t ignore the fact that she was white. Flora was not. In 2021, a media giant like Netflix should have realized that something like that is not cool. The same goes for Musa. By erasing their diversity, Straffi’s original intentions melted away like they were nothing.
Finally, we have Tecna (the girl in purple before). Where was she?!
~
Fate: The Winx Saga has since been renewed for a season two. Will I watch it? Yes, but they have so much they need to either bring in or bring back including:
All in all, as my friend eloquently put it, it’s “a story that lacks as much interest as it does sparkles and wings.”