what happened to tinkerbell and the ring of belief?

so in the year 2000 Disney launched the Disney Princess brand imagine [Music] I swear this is connected to Tinkerbell just bear with me so if you didn't know Disney Princesses weren't always marketed together as a group they would release a movie release merchandise for that movie and then move on to the next movie so you can just like go to Target and find a bunch of Disney princess dolls and lunch boxes with the princesses on them so The Story Goes that Andrew Mooney who was a former Nike executive became the head of Disney consumer products they are the branch of Disney that is in charge of the merchandising and the way he tells it he went to go see a Disney on Ice show and all the little girls were wearing like generic knockoff brand princess costumes but not like Disney branded princess dresses because Disney did not sell those and Andrew thought hold on they should be buying this stuff from us this is a huge missed opportunity these little girls are gonna like anything with the princesses on them and the parents are gonna buy it we should put all the Disney princesses together and Market them as their own brand and this was actually met with a lot of resistance from the Disney Executives specifically Roy E Disney Walt's nephew so there was Walt and Walt's brother Roy who was very involved in the company and then Roy's son who is also named Roy and he was an executive at the company and Roy was concerned that this would cheapen the Disney brand and like weaken all the princesses individual mythologies because Disney has this concept of character integrity so all the depictions of a Disney character should reflect them accurately and respect their Source material as though they are a real person who actually exists so the idea was that like you couldn't put Snow White and Jasmine together on a t-shirt because they're from different movies bees and they haven't met each other and they don't know each other because they're in like entirely separate universes Disney has sort of relaxed these rules in recent years I think because they realized that having the princesses all be best friends is more fun and marketable and no one actually cares but at the time they were much more strict so the compromise for the Disney Princess brand was that the princesses would be next to each other but not actually interacting so not touching not making eye contact and often they're depicted in what's come to be called this pink void because if they're all in an environment together like they're all in a castle together that implies that they're all in the same place and thus actually next to each other and thus interacting so the Disney Princess brand released and became a multi-billion dollar franchise and like obviously in hindsight the Disney Princess brand is genius because it allows Disney to make money off of characters they already have who were already successful and well liked individually and it's super low risk because they didn't have to develop anything new so like the new live-action Disney movies they still have to like spend millions of dollars to make a movie versus the Disney Princess brand where all they had to do was print the same couple illustrations of like Ariel and Sleeping Beauty on like backpacks and pajamas one weird thing about the Disney Princess brand is that they launched it without really doing any marketing or any focus group testing and so it took them a few years to figure out what sold well and fine-tuned the brand so for example the lineup of who was an official Disney princess took a little while to figure out Esmeralda from Hunchback was originally part of the lineup she got booted out pretty quickly and Tinkerbell was originally an official Disney princess she was pretty quickly removed it's a very one of these things is not like the other situation the rest of the princesses are human women who were the main character or at least a lead character in a theatrically released movie with catchy songs in it Tinkerbell is a human looking magical being who is not human-sized and she is a sidekick who literally never speaks Tinkerbell is a very interesting character because she was mostly used in the Disney company as like a symbol of the brand so she would be like in DVD intros and flying over the castle in the Disney parks and animated into the Walt Disney shows but she wasn't like a character like the princesses are so much as like a magical pin-up girl so little girls didn't care about Tinkerbell the same way that they cared about like Ariel so Tinkerbell got kicked out of the princesses but then Andrew Mooney decided that Tinkerbell should get her own franchise he is quoted as saying we were fundamentally missing an opportunity in terms of getting Tinkerbell out there as a character there's clearly latent demand and he said that he thought that the Disney Fairies franchise could be as big as the princesses I believe there had been pitches and concept art for a Disney Fairies franchise as far back as like 2001. according to artists Lisa temming on her portfolio website the Disney consumer products toy division was trying to develop a more diverse stall line inspired by Disney characters this would have been a cast of original characters set in an existing Disney property so from a character integrity perspective the characters could interact because they all exist in the same universe their ideas were either Ariel and a bunch of mermaid friends or Tinkerbell and a bunch of fairy friends and years later Andrew Mooney thought that Tinkerbell could be marketable so they started to develop a Disney Fairies brand and so the idea of Disney Fairies was taken to Disney publishing in 2004 and they asked Disney publishing to develop a novel that would sort of flesh out the characters and promote them and so Disney publishing hired award-winning children's novelist Gail Carson Levine and the first Disney Fairies book was released in 2005 and it was called fairy dust and the Quest for the egg and so there ended up being a Trilogy of Gale Carson Levine fairy books a spin-off chapter book series a line of fashion dolls and other toys like miniature playsets and stuff and this was all pre-tinkerbell movies so all of this was out before there was any Tinkerbell movie out the Disney fairies books and the tying merchandise is sort of like the first generation of the Disney Fairies brand here's a brief explanation of the lore of the Disney fairies books because I'm going to be referencing it later the books take place after the events of Peter Pan Tinkerbell has stopped hanging out with him because she felt like he was taking her for granted and so she has gone back to live with the other fairies in Neverland because Tinkerbell isn't the only fairy there's a whole society of fairies who live together in Neverland in a magical world called Pixie Hollow they live together inside of a tree called the home tree and they have a fairy queen named Queen Clarion the fairies spend their day to day doing chores to make sure everything in the world runs smoothly so like growing food and making repairs that kind of thing and they also help take care of the nature in Pixie Hollow so making sure the plants and the animals are all happy pixie dust comes from a wise magic bird named mother Dove mother Dove is the source of all magic in Neverland and she was born of a fire that destroyed Neverland her feathers are collected when she molts and then ground up into pixie dust fairies use pixie dust to fly and to perform magic different groups of fairies have different magical abilities which are called talents so for example Tinkerbell is a tinker talent fairy so she can use magic to fix things and invent things the Gale Carson Levine books follow the fairies going on quests to protect Pixie Hollow from some external threat and the chapter books follow the day-to-day problems of a bunch of different fairies with a bunch of different talents and these books did really well I owned still own basically all of them and so while this book franchise was happening they started work on a direct DVD movie that would sort of expand the reach of the franchise and then this is where the story starts to get a little bit complicated because the making of this first Tinkerbell movie was a disaster it took a lot longer than it was supposed to it cost way more than it was supposed to and it went through a ton of different versions that all got scrapped and so I would like to try and piece together what happened behind the scenes and try to figure out what this original version of Tinkerbell would have looked like so I can't find out when production on the first Tinkerbell movie began I think it was probably around 2004 when the franchise first got started and just animated movies take longer than books but I'm not sure on that but what I do know for sure is that in mid 2006 Disney announced at the New York Licensing fair that they had cast clueless star Brittany Murphy to voice Tinkerbell in an upcoming movie and the movie was going to be direct to video and made it Disney tune Studios which was run by Sharon Morrell Disney tune Studios was founded in 1990 as sort of a division of Disney's television animation before it sort of broke off and they specialized in direct to video Disney sequels and these direct to video Disney sequels have a reputation of being cash grabs with pointless storylines and cheap animation the word cheap quills came up a lot while I was researching Disney tune but like for context this was when Michael Eisner was CEO of the Disney Company an anonymous source at Disney tune claimed that years ago Michael Eisner told Sharon Morrell and feature animation that he no longer wanted to be beholden to animators so he told them from then on all Quote creative decisions would be made by his managers and Executives so these direct to video sequels were all always intended to be mediocre cash crabs and to be fair they were very successful mediocre cash grabs they were very cheap to make usually between like 5 and 15 million dollars and they would make tens of millions of dollars in video sales Return of Jafar was the first direct to video sequel it costs around three million dollars to make and made over a hundred million dollars in video sales so Disney tune Studios was Michael eisner's money making machine which he had a lot of projects that were not money making machines however in 2004 Michael Eisner was voted out as chairman of the company Michael Eisner I believe was both CEO of the company and chairman of the company basically he was booted out because of a coup started by Roy E Disney Who convinced 43 percent of shareholders to vote against Eisner because Roy did not like the direction Eisner was taking the company my dad my uncle and those that followed have created an amazing Legacy that has touched people around the world for Generations lately though I've become concerned with the direction in which the Disney company is moving I believe it's time to take action and we could use your help if you're a Disney shareholder in my view the best way to help save Disney is to vote no on the re-election of Michael Eisner George Mitchell Judith Estrin and John Bryson I believe a new day is Dawning for the Walt Disney Company and with your help we can bring back the magic [Music] Roy said that under Eisner Disney has become a soulless conglomerate always looking for a quick Buck remember the cash grab sequels and the Disney Princess brand Roy did not like those so because he was voted out as chairman Eisner then also stepped down as CEO in 2005 and he was replaced by Bob Iger one of the first things Bob Iger did as CEO was the Pixar merger at the beginning of 2006 Disney acquired Pixar for 7 billion dollars and as part of this merger Pixar Vice President John Lasseter was appointed Chief creative officer of the Disney Animation Studios a brief career history of John Lasseter Lasseter worked at Disney but was fired then he got a job at lucasfilm but then that division of lucasfilm was bought by Steve Jobs and turned into Pixar while at Pixar Laster had directed Toy Story A Bug's Life Toy Story 2 and cars which was set to come out later in 2006. Laster had been become vice president of Pixar and so then when the Pixar merger happened he was made the head of Walt Disney feature animation so he oversaw all of Walt Disney Animation Studios projects as executive producer so he was not technically in charge of the Disney tune Studio but it was like under his umbrella and I think he was also in charge of how the Disney characters were portrayed so Lester hated the direct to video movies he thought they were cheap and made Disney look bad so he canceled a lot of direct to video projects that were in development this included jumbo 2 The Aristocats too Chicken Little 2 colon the ugly duckling story Meet the Robinsons too colon first date Mulan 3 the Seven Dwarves and a plan series called Disney princess Enchanted Tales they had basically already finished the first one so they released that but then they canceled the subsequent ones so to recap at this point the guy who loves cheap cash grabs is out and there's a new guy who hates cheap cash grabs who now oversees the studio that exclusively makes cheap cash grabs so Disney tune Studios was in trouble and so was the Tinkerbell movie so there were multiple different drafts that happened over the course of this project and it's kind of confusing so I hope I have this all right first there was a short-lived 2D version of the Tinkerbell movie but at some point Cher Morrell and the then president of Walt Disney feature animation before he got replaced by Laster agreed that today was out and 3D was in so they scrapped all the 2D work and started over in 3D I don't know how far into it they had gotten with the 2D I don't think it was that far but then they started on a CGI animated movie that initially had the working title Tinkerbell and The Ring of belief at some point they started calling it just Tinkerbell but I'm going to be calling this version The Ring of belief just so that it's clear what I'm talking about and so they got very far into this movie like they got so close that there were previews of the movie on Disney DVDs you know the like coming soon to own on DVD and video that thing so like Disney DVDs that came out at that time had trailers for this Tinkerbell movie which means that we have some finished pieces of Animation from these trailers so if it was coming soon why did it never come out so Disney Tunes started working on ring of belief and at the beginning of this process they went through like a dozen directors and two dozen scripts because Sharon Morrell kind of had a vision for what she wanted this project to be and she was heavily involved and kept shooting down different ideas I don't think she wrote the script but I think a lot of elements of the plot were her idea so they did a lot of concept art and storyboards for it a lot of which has been made public over the years we're going to talk about it and then mid-2006 they make the project public and announce that they are casting Brittany Murphy and then at some point after that they sent the project to an animation studio in India that was going to do the CGI work because often that part is outsourced because it's cheaper to get it made in other countries so if they had already gotten to the point where they had sent the project off to India that means that at this point they had probably finish the concept art and the storyboards and the script and the voiceover it's possible that they weren't done with all of that animation is a little bit weird things will often happen out of order so like they'll start a project start animating it change the story animate different things it's not as clear of an order of operations I believe the documentary about the making of Frozen two kind of touches on this of like changing things and reworking things throughout the production which is also what happened with Tinkerbell so at this point Cher Morrell asked John Laster to take a look at the project because the Pixar merger had just happened and John Laster was now the head of Walt Disney feature animation and that was sort of the professional thing to do to show your boss what projects your studio is working on some sources frame this as like Sharon was worried about the plot of the movie and she wanted advice I guess that's possible but later on she seems very reluctant to make changes to the plot which makes me question whether she actually wanted plot advice especially since this story was her idea but I don't know maybe so she showed us a draft of the movie to John Lasseter Bob Iger and Dick cook who was the chairman of Disney at this point and allegedly Bob Iger and Dick cook were like looks good it seems like it's 80 to 90 percent complete so it'll be ready in time for its fall 2007 release which if that's true that's crazy first of all all that the CEO of Disney saw it and was fine with it but it still ended up being scrapped and changed and also if it was 90 done which is so close to being done I feel like most of the time with canceled projects and scrap projects it's in sort of the early stages like the Disney Princess Enchanted Tales it was almost done so they released it the rest of the planned films were not almost done so they were scrapped but I think it's much more normal for if a project is almost done to just release it and not cancel it because at that point it's a real waste of your investment but meanwhile John Lasseter hates it he has extensive notes now why did John Lester hate it what were his notes well in order to explain that I have to explain the plot of the movie which I have not done yet so let's do that so this is going to be based on the animated previews on the Disney DVD releases animatics that are online and art like concept art and storyboards which I mostly found archived on a Tumblr blog called Art of Disney Fairies which if you're interested in this topic you should go and just scroll through that blog I think I spent like hours on there I'm also going to be using some written material like the Tinkerbell Wiki The Lost media Wiki and articles which were written at the time talking about the production of this movie there's this one specific article which was written by a now defunct media company that I found archived on the Wayback machine there was like a link to it in the Lost media Wiki and there's a lot of great information in that most of which is corroborated by other sources I've made like basically like a poor man's annotated bibliography it's a Google doc with like links to all of the different sources and bullet pointed underneath those links the information that I took from the sources and so I'm going to link that Google doc in the description so you have all of my sources so that's my disclaimer as to where I got any of this information so in ring of belief the fairies still all live together in Pixie Hollow but there's some pretty big changes from the books so they don't get pixie dust from mother Dove and they don't all live together in the home tree I think they probably got rid of the home tree pretty early on in this process because it's basically just like a Whimsical apartment complex like it's more fun if all of the fairies live in their own unique Little Homes and I think they got rid of mother Dove pretty early on too because she's like kind of a weird concept and I think it's easier to buy into mother Dove when she's just like a book character and you don't have to see her move and talk which I think would have been a harder sell so I think she was probably cut very early I did find one piece of concept art that like kind of implies that mother Dove existed there's a lot of pieces of concept art of this like magical book which I never really figured out what that was or what it was going to be for but there is multiple different pieces of art of different versions of this book and one of the versions has like captions next to the different drawings so I think this must have been taken from like the artist's website or something and one of the captions mentions that the book has a feather taken from mother Dove herself and that's the only mention I found of mother Dove which I would love to be a fly on the wall for the conversations where they decided to cut this weird bird so instead of mother Dove there's a pixie dust tree that makes pixie dust and it's sort of in the center of Pixie Hollow I think that's probably part of the reason why they got rid of the home tree because it would be weird if there's like the pixie dust tree and the home tree something interesting to note is that there were still fairy books being put out while this movie was in production and so there are elements of the movie that are put into these books to sort of set the groundwork of the ideas that we're going to be in the movies so multiple books from this time have art of the pixie dust tree and the way they explain it is that in ancient fairy times before the events of the chapter books there is a pixie dust tree that was destroyed one book very vaguely attributes this to like a Darkness while another book says it was destroyed in a battle and then mother Dove came after that so they wanted the movies to be different from the books but still have them exist in the same universe so they had them exist many years apart to explain the differences and since the movies are an origin story of Tinkerbell the movies are way earlier in the timeline and the chapter books are much later and it's interesting to use the Disney fairies books to sort of track the changes that were happening with the Tinkerbell movie so the pixie dust tree and ring of belief looks different than the pixie dust tree in the final released Tinkerbell movie and the book illustrations look like the pixie dust tree from ring of belief because the books were made when they were still working on that movie so pixie dust tree instead of mother Dove and the home tree and then Tinkerbell has four main friends each have a different Talent there's Rosetta who's a garden talent fairy she can like make flowers bloom Iridessa who's a light Town fairy she can like Bend sunlight there's Fawn who's an animal talent fairy she can like communicate with animals and they're Silvermist who's a water talent fairy and she can like manipulate water these fairies were put into one of the chapter books and they have very early designs most obviously Fawn is wearing purple which she wears purple and a lot of the very early movie concept art because she originated as a side character in the books who wore purple then their designs were finalized for Ring of belief Fawn wears orange and each of the girls color palettes is simplified I think they learned from the Disney Princess brand that it's easier for kids to identify characters when they have a signature color when ring of belief was scrapped in favor of the released Tinkerbell movie they did one last redesign where Iridessa goes from this pale yellow two-piece to a sunflower dress but this was such a last minute change that she still wears the old outfit in the final trailer some merchandise and for the meet and greet character in The Parks which I'm guessing all that stuff was already made and it was too late to change it so those are our main characters in the voiceover from one of the animated previews Rosetta Fawn and Iridessa are all introduced it was iridescent sparkling light fairy Rosetta the Beautiful garden fairy form the fun-loving animal fairy but silver mist's introduction is she's the glue that holds this group of girls together and silver mist she's the glue that keeps this group of girls together and it's been theorized that silver mist was originally going to have a much bigger role in this movie she was going to be best friends with Tinkerbell there's a lot of like storyboards of her and Tinkerbell together so Tinkerbell has these four friends and they're all going to Fairy School together they are training to be Wing maidens Wing maidens travel to the human world they call it the mainland because Neverland is an island and so the human world would be the mainland and the wing maidens Inspire and bring imagination to human children it is the mission of every fairy to become a wing maiden and spread imagination to the children of the world by using pixie dust because human children means belief in fairies is what keeps fairies alive this concept traces all the way back to the original Peter Pan JM Berry play which I don't actually know all that much about considering all of my fairy knowledge but there is that thing of like Tinkerbell is dying and you have to clap to show that you believe in Tinkerbell and that like brings her back to life so it's this idea that humans specifically human children keep fairies alive by believing in them and then it's sort of a symbiotic relationship children keep fairies alive with their belief and fairies bring imagination to Children this is the so-called ring of belief we're pretty sure that the Ring of belief is not an actual physical ring like a wedding ring because considering it was the title of the movie I feel like there would have been like concept art of this ring but I don't think it's an actual physical ring it's like a metaphor I would compare it to like the the circle of life like the Natural Balance and Harmony of magic human children and fairies one of the Disney fairies books from this time has a page explaining the Ring of belief and it definitely seems to imply that it's an abstract concept of the relationship between humans and fairies and not like a ring that you wear I would like to note that human children believing in fairies is a concept that features pretty heavily in both the Gale Carson Levine books and to a lesser extent the chapter books so they were definitely already utilizing this concept of human children keeping fairies alive by believing in them so this idea is not like unique to this movie it predates this movie by quite a bit I just think it's important to mention that because it does seem a little bit random but the fairies go to this fairy school to learn how to inspire children and be Wing maidens and when they graduate this school they earn their pixie dust which is a little bit confusing to me because in all of the books and the Tinkerbell movies that ended up being released fairies need pixie dust in order to fly and perform magic but it seems like in this ring of belief movie fairies could do that without pixie dust like there's a storyboard of them in Fairy School before they've graduated and earned their pixie dust and they are like flying around and Performing magic so maybe the pixie dust mainly has to do with the mainland and the human children I'm not sure but the idea of having to earn pixie dust comes up in a lot of different sources so we have a storyboard of the fairies in this Fairy School the teacher is a fairy named fairy Mary a version of this character ended up in the final released Tinkerbell movie but in ring of belief she was a school teacher and there's a storyboard where she is like getting the class to settle down and then having them practice using their magic to inspire a human child by using these like human child dolls all of the fairies have a doll and they're using whatever their type of magic is to practice inspiring children and there's another storyboard where Iridessa who is a very high strung character which carries over to her characterization in the final released Tinkerbell movies and in this version she's a very like studious Bookworm teacher's pet as well as being very anxious so there's a story word where she's worried that she'll end up in a situation where there isn't any light and so she won't be able to use light to inspire a human child and Tinkerbell and Silvermist are telling her to calm down and she's going to do fine this next part of the story is a little bit confusing to me because I feel like there's conflicting information as to how this plot point would have gone so I'm going to present different hypothetical versions so the first way this story could have gone is that the fairies are in Fairy School they have their test to see if they graduate and become Wing maidens and Tinkerbell's friends all pass but Tinkerbell does not pass and so she does not earn her pixie dust and then Tinkerbell decides that she's going to steal some pixie dust and then another part that I'm unclear on is that maybe her friends helped her steal this pixie dust or maybe they didn't because I feel like different sources imply different things so Tink or Tink and her friends attempt to steal some pixie dust but then it disappears and I think what we mean by that is like all of the pixie dust disappears like there's no pixie dust left by attempting to steal it we've like messed up the balance of magic and so now the pixie dust is gone something that pretty consistently comes up about the plot of this movie is that Tinkerbell would have broken the Ring of belief somehow and then she has to figure out a way to fix it and so probably stealing the pixie dust is what breaks the Ring of belief because now there's no pixie dust and the human children on the mainland begin to lose their belief in fairies and lose their imagination and fairies are starting to disappear we have a finished piece of Animation from one of the trailers where Tink looks at her hand and it's like starting to fade away and so the fairies have to somehow fix this and restore the Ring of belief before all of the fairies disappear and in the sources that mention that her friends were involved with stealing the pixie dust it says that then Tinkerbell and her friends are given individual quests to try and fix the Ring of belief which I don't think I've found anything that supports that like I don't think I've found any storyboards that suggest that the fairies are doing quests but maybe I don't know we do have a storyboard of Tinkerbell and her friends sitting and looking upset guilty maybe fairy Mary is there and she's upset with them and then Queen Clarion comes and this storyboard doesn't write out the full lines of dialogue so we have like the first three words and then an ellipses which is unhelpful for my purposes but Queen Clarion says to Tinkerbell today I told you to place your dot dot dot you broke that trust in the worst possible way so I feel like that storyboard could have been Tinkerbell and her friends stole the pixie dust and now fairy Mary and Queen Clarion are disappointed in all of them because if the friends weren't involved then why would they be there for this but then I do feel like there are some sources that to me imply that Tinkerbell stole the pixie dust alone there's an animatic that you can find online where Tinkerbell says I broke the Ring of belief I implying that it is mostly or entirely her fault and then I feel like there's some sources that imply that Tinkerbell did get her pixie dust but then it got like taken away or something else went wrong we have finished animation in the trailer of Tinkerbell and her friends all getting pixie dust from Queen Clarion that could either be they graduated and have earned their pixie dust and Queen Clarion is giving it to them or it could be like at the end of the movie after the Ring of belief has been broken and subsequently repaired as part of the resolution of the movie Queen Clarion gives them all pixie dust again because now the pixie dust is back then there's a storyboard where Tinkerbell's friends are like waiting for her and Tinkerbell is like in a meeting with Queen Clarion and it seems like Tinkerbell has done something wrong and Queen Clarion is upset with her and irides is trying to calm silver Miss down and she's like well what's the worst that could happen and fawn very unhelpfully is like well Queen Clarion could revoke her graduation take away from her pixie dust and banish her from Pixie Hollow which that implies that Tinkerbell did graduate and did earn her pixie dust but now has done something wrong that might negate that so maybe she wanted to steal more pixie dust I don't know then there's the orphans a seemingly big part of this movie would have been multiple orphan characters who live together in an orphanage in London and this is kind of like Peter Pan era London so like 1800s the skyline and the buildings look kind of like Peter Pan and so there's quite a bit of material that is concept art of London of the Orphans of the orphanage and then storyboards of the fairies interacting with the orphans and there seems to be one main orphan girl named Victoria there's a Finnish animation in a lot of those preview trailers where the fairies are sort of flying around this little girl and they put a flower crown on her head that would have been Victoria and so this sort of ties into the plot of losing the Ring of belief because now these orphans are starting to lose their sense of imagination and their happiness and so fixing the Ring of belief probably had to do with Tinkerbell interacting with Victoria in some way I think that there might have been multiple different trips of the fairies going to this orphanage in London I'm thinking like they go while they're still wing maidens in training because there's a finished piece of Animation that I think was a deleted scene DVD extra on the finished released Tinkerbell movie DVD the senior about to watch was designed around Tinkerbell and all of her friends first trip to the mainland but as our story evolved it became more about Tinkerbell and her first trip to the mainland so we opted to take this shot out because it did include all five girls going to the mainland and to me this scene very much looks like it was from ring of belief and they were maybe hoping to repurpose it in some way but then it didn't work out because it's Tinkerbell and her friends and fairy Mary dressed in the all-purple outfit that she wore in ring of belief and it's this very light-hearted tone of like iridescence nervous give a password [Music] but then they all get there and they have a lot of fun interacting with different human things like a horse-drawn carriage and a Street Lamp and so I think that this would have happened earlier on in the ring of belief movie while they are still in school to be Wing maidens but they're like practicing traveling to the mainland and maybe practicing interacting with children and this is when we first Meet the Orphans and Tinkerbell first meets Victoria and then later once the Ring of belief is broken they have to go back to the mainland to try and fix it because there's just so much material of these orphans and that finished piece of Animation really feels like before the Ring of belief was broken so I think it was two separate trips and then the last element of the Ring of belief movie is the Pirates and Peter Pan and the lost boys so we don't really know how they would have tied into the movie as a whole because I don't think they really would have been involved while Tinkerbell and her friends are in Fairy School there's just some storyboards of Peter Pan and the lost boys and the Pirates and specifically Captain Hook that don't really have the fairies in them they seem pretty separate but then we know that towards the end of Ring of belief The Lost Boys and Peter Pan are captured in London and held on like a barge like a ship and there's concept art of this barge and there's storyboards that look similar to the art of the barge so these storyboards were probably taking place on this barge where there's like a shadowy figure in the doorway and you can kind of see a hook so it's probably Captain Hook who captured them and also silver mist and Tinkerbell are like trapped inside of a lantern like the glass box kind of lantern and so for some reason Captain Hook captures Peter Pan the Lost Boys silver mist and Tinkerbell and is holding them on a barge in London sort of towards the end of the movie and I don't necessarily have a lot of great theories for that I think that the idea of the Tinkerbell movies in general was to provide a backstory for Tinkerbell so I think that ring of belief was going to also try and provide a backstory for Peter Pan and the lost boys and Captain Hook what makes sense to me is that this is maybe before Captain Hook has gone to Neverland and so my like headcanon theory is that Captain Hook is in London because he's like from London like he went to Eaton college right and he somehow learns about Neverland or learns about magic or something and he wants to go to Neverland and wants to have Magic for his own nefarious purposes and so he somehow finds Peter Pan and the fairies and captures them in the hopes that he will somehow get pixiedust from them or figure out a way to get to Neverland that makes the most sense to me for why this would have happened and I would guess that at this point the Ring of belief is already broken and so the fairies are fading away and they don't have any pixie dust and they're trying to fix it but Tinkerbell and civil are missed getting captured is like another obstacle they're running out of time and now they're captured so we've wasted even more time in that animatic I brought up from earlier the animatic starts with Silvermist and Tinkerbell being held in a glass Lantern and their other friends come and break them out but there's some bigger problem that we need to solve because Silvermist is like where's Queen Clarion we need her help to like fix something else and the other fairies are like she's already disappearing she can't help us too late what she's starting to disappear disappear it was horrible what's happening Tinkerbell's the only one who can fix all this you were right still well she has to do it she can't do it I was wrong it's all over and then Tinkerbell is like I broke the Ring of belief I have to fix this now I have to mend it I have to but I can't do it without pixie dust so she asks her friends to give her their pixie dust I can't do it without pixie dust take mine so she doesn't have pixie dust either she never got it in the first place or she had it taken away and so Tinkerbell and her friends all joined hands and they give Tinkerbell their pixie dust and then her friends fade away so now it's just Tinkerbell left leaving her to try and somehow fix this on her own which separate from these storyboards in this animatic it is written specifically in that one archived article that in the original plot of Ring of belief Peter Pan and the lost boys are captured and all of the fairies die and so I think this sort of supports that I believe at some point Tinkerbell also Fades away I didn't really find Art or storyboards of that but that article does say the fairies even Tinkerbell disappear and then I think on the Tinkerbell Wiki it says that there's a scene where Tinkerbell Fades away but then she comes back so I think it's one of those things where like she tries to fix the Ring of belief probably by interacting with Victoria but then we think oh no it's too late eight she didn't fix it in time and she Fades away and we think oh no all the pixie dust is lost and all of the characters are kidnapped or disappeared into Oblivion but it's a fake out and then Tinkerbell and everybody comes back and so that scene from a lot of the previews where Queen Clarion gives Tinkerbell and her friends pixie dust that could be from the end of the movie after Tinkerbell comes back Queen Clarion gives Tinkerbell and all of her friends pixie dust because like in the process of Disappearing and coming back they like lost their pixie dust or something I think it's possible that that's what that scene could have been and so I think that's like the overall plot Fairy School to be Wing maiden's Tinkerbell doesn't graduate or she does but then has her graduation revoked she or possibly her and her friends try and steal pixie dust but that sort of upsets the balance of magic and now they have to go to the mainland and fix it probably by encouraging the orph belief in fairies Tinkerbell and silvermists get sidetracked because they are captured by Captain Hook who has his own nefarious plan but they are freed by their friends Tinkerbell is given their pixie dust so that she can try and fix the Ring of belief she almost doesn't do it in time but then she does happily ever after here's some other random things from the storyboards and the concept art there's a couple pieces of Art and storyboard that seem to imply that there would have been like other magical creatures I'm guessing those probably got cut pretty early on because I don't know how that would have tied into the plot and there's a lot of storyboards and stuff that seem to imply that Tinkerbell was a bad student there's art of her like about to punch another fairy in the face and she plays lots of pranks she convinced the Whispering Woods to say insults to fairy Mary and she painted spots on the mirrors and switched winifred's shampoo with crabgrass Winifred is a character who comes up occasionally she's in that fairy Mary classroom storyboard some materials show tension between Iridessa and Tinkerbell because Iridessa is a very serious student and does not like that Tink is a troublemaker one storyboard implies that they used to be friends when they were younger but have since drifted apart according to Lisa temming's portfolio silver mist and Rosetta were among the First characters that were invented for this Disney Fairies brand so all the way back when it was just going to be a toy line they had the idea for Silvermist and Rosetta they became Side characters in the books and then became main characters in the movies and throughout that their designs went pretty much unchanged meanwhile Fawn is a minor character in the books Iridessa does not really show up anywhere until they started development for the movies so like in the books that mentioned the pixie dust tree that's when Iridessa First shows up two main characters from the books Vidya and Terence were not in this ring of belief movie but they did end up in the final release Tinkerbell movie so at some point they decided to add them back in from the books oh and also Tinkerbell talks and all the fairies talk and you're just gonna have to get over that if you grew up with the Peter Pan movie there's a lot of Articles where these bloggers are like confused like when did Tinkerbell learn how to talk did she lose that later on and it's like maybe because I grew up with the books and not the Peter Pan movie it always made complete sense to me that Tinkerbell and the fairies can talk to each other but they can't talk to humans humans just can't understand them but that was a pretty big change from the Peter Pan movie the people seem to have a big problem with so that's sort of my reconstruction of Ring of belief based on all the materials that we have that have been made public that's my guess of what the plot would have been and sort of the look of the movie so last or saw a draft of this movie which was allegedly maybe 80 to 90 percent done which I would guess means that like some of the lighting and the textures weren't done the models of the characters were made but they hadn't been like fully rigged yet I don't actually know that much about CGI animation so I'm gonna stop talking but Laster saw it and he hated it and it seems like the main point of contention was he didn't like how much of the movie took place in London and he didn't like that Peter Pan and the lost boys were in the movie he did not want audiences to see these iconic characters in this iconic location animated in CGI with a completely different story and then compare this movie negatively to the original Peter Pan movie so we didn't want audiences to see a CGI Peter Pan getting captured on a London barge and think it was stupid which I kind of agree with him not for like a character integrity reason not because I'm afraid that ring of belief would have ruined Peter Pan but just because I don't really like Peter Pan I think that the big weakness of Tinkerbell is that she is inextricably linked to Peter Pan if I had my way Tinkerbell would be completely independent in her own little bubble separate from London and Neverland and Peter Pan and Pirates she's just a fairy living with her friends in a magical world don't worry about any of the Peter Pan stuff and Lassiter also allegedly said fairies don't bring imagination criticizing the whole Wing Maiden plot which like is a hilarious thing to say it's like saying unicorns don't bring happiness like what are you talking about John none of this is real also it is based on the Peter Pan lore and the existing Disney fairies books to have the fairies need the belief of children in order to not disappear like this isn't some new outlandish concept made up for this movie so he definitely didn't like the Peter Pan and London elements and maybe also didn't like the whole Wing Maiden plot which like dude that's all of the movie the movie's almost done it's too late for that allegedly a Disney tune executive said we can only change 50 of this movie and still have it ready for a fall 2007 release like with the amount that we have done and the amount of time we have left we can't overhaul the whole thing and I think that definitely the wing Maiden stuff is too woven in like that's the whole plot I think London and the orphans were a pretty considerable amount of the runtime I think you maybe could have cut out Peter Pan and so maybe just silver mist and Tinkerbell get captured by some Rando not Captain Hook or we just cut out the getting captured in the first place and then I think that would sort of get rid of a lot of the Peter Pan presents but who knows maybe he's more present in the beginning of the movie and I just don't have any sources for that but I think you could make some changes that would make Lassiter happy but he seemed to have just fundamentally disagreed with this entire movie which I don't know allegedly John Laster and Bob Iger watched this draft Bob Iger is the CEO and if he was cool with it maybe we don't have to change it maybe it's not a big deal and then a lot of sources say that Sharon Morell agreed to make these changes but secretly had the studio continue working on ring of belief which I don't really understand how that could have worked first of all the movie was allegedly almost done so I don't really understand how much more work we needed on it I don't know if the Disney tune studio in California was still working on it or if it was at a point where it was sort of all up to the studio in India and then I don't understand what she had agreed to change because it couldn't have been all of his changes because we know that was too extensive so it wouldn't have been ready in time so was their agreement to make some of the changes to have it ready in time or was the agreement to do all of the changes and push the release date and then I don't know what her end game was because let's say you have your studio in California or your studio in India or both continue working on Ring Of the Leaf which it's almost done so then you finish it and then what do you go to Bob Iger and say hey look this isn't what John Laster wanted but it's done so we may as well put it out or was she just hoping that Jon Laster would change his mind like see that there wasn't enough time and go okay let's just use your version and then she could say great because my version is almost done and then the next problem is that the Tinkerbell movies were always meant to be a franchise so there was going to be ring of belief and then there was a proposed Trilogy that would have followed that and so after Lassiter saw this ring of belief draft didn't like it they maybe agreed to do some changes but Sharon was lying and was actually still working on ring of belief then Sharon had to do a pitch to John Lasseter of what her proposed Trilogy would be that would follow ring of belief or I guess the Laster cut of Ring of belief and this part of the story is not mentioned in very many places this came up in that archived article that I found and at first I fully didn't believe it was real I was like what are you talking about first of all second of all this isn't really mentioned anywhere else so I have nothing to prove that it's real and also it's just such a crazy pitch that I don't believe this happened so allegedly the first film of this Trilogy would be Tinkerbell finding out that there are boy fairies in Neverland before this all of the fairies were female but it turns out that all of the boy fairies had been banished to another part of Neverland and I like what but then all of the characters in ring of belief are girl fairies there's not any boy fairies and the title Wing maidens is a female gendered term so okay and then one of tink's friends ends up falling in love with a boy fairy and there ends up being a fairy War which I think could maybe be the battle that we said destroyed the pixie dust tree and the boys sacrifices himself for Tank's friend and then Tinker Bell and her friends go to a concert by an all-girl fairy band which was allegedly referred to at Disney tune as the pixie chicks and then in the second and third films we find out that the boy fairy isn't actually dead we resolve the conflict between the girl and boy fairies and we all live happily ever after and I read this and I was like no way because it seems just so disconnected from ring of belief which Cher Morrell was very passionate about Ring of belief she didn't want to change it it was her story so it seemed crazy that her follow-up Trilogy would be so unrelated to ring of belief it seems so disconnected and there's nothing else that supports that this existed except for maybe that all of the fairies in ring of belief were girls which could be interpreted as an all-girl fairy Society the then I found a snippet of animation of an all-girl fairy band performing a concert and there's a storyboard where Tink and her friends are going to a concert and a character who we don't know presumably the friend who falls in love with the boy fairy goes up on stage to sing with the band also Iridessa finds the missing page of a book that she's been looking for and it seems to be about battles and I was like okay so I think these are the pixie chicks and this is the concert which validates at least that element of this article so maybe that whole pitch was real I mean it's possible that this fairy band is separate like it was part of a different pitch and the whole like very War gender segregation Romeo and Juliet plot was unrelated I feel like that's still kind of unsubstantiated by the evidence that I have but I don't know I think at least some elements of it are real and was part of an actual pitch because it seems like too much of a coincidence for this article to say this was the pitch for the follow-up Trilogy and for elements of that pitch to be real that would be a weird coincidence I think it does mean that this pitch was real and so unsurprisingly Jon Lasseter hated this pitch he allegedly stormed out of the screening and people at Disney tune were concerned that he would try and get the studio shut down because he already didn't like them or any of the projects they had ever released and he was already butting heads with Sarah Morrell on this Tinkerbell movie and so I think seeing this pitch of the direction this franchise was headed he really hated it and that sort of confirmed for him that what Disney tune was doing was bad and that Sharon and her ideas for Tinkerbell were bad there's a quote that comes up a lot that Jon Laster said that the version of Tinkerbell that he saw was quote virtually unwatchable I think it's possible he was saying that about Ring of belief but I also think it's possible he was saying it about this Trilogy pitch and then allegedly the very next day Laster had a meeting with Sharon Morrell and the current director of Tinkerbell Bradley Raymond and the two of them were going to present their ideas for how to fix the Tinkerbell movie so their pitches for how to change ring of belief based on his notes which again is a little bit confusing because haven't we already started on a version based on his notes that's the whole working on one version to appease John Laster but still working on the original version of Ring of belief because sources do talk about like allegedly Jean Laster would come and visit the studio and they would show him his version but they were secretly still working on ring of belief so I did think that at this point in the story we have been working on a Jon Laster approved version but I don't know maybe they hadn't gone very far into that or he didn't like that version either and he wanted to get some other ideas so he wanted pitches from share morale and Bradley Raymond Bradley Raymond was directing ring of belief which then turned into the final release Tinkerbell movie he had been a director at Disney tune he directed Pocahontas 2 colon journey to a new world The Hunchback of Notre Dame 2 and The Lion King one and a half and so Bradley Raymond pitched his idea and Lasser really liked it but it would require them to scrap about 90 percent of Ring of belief and then Sharon Morrell did a pitch of like here's what we could feasibly do with all of the assets and work that we have already and the amount of time we have left and so obviously it did not deviate from ring of belief that much and so Lester did not like that pitch and he allegedly said that he would not support a movie with Peter Pan in it so we scratched ring of belief and then we started working on Bradley Raymond's pitch which would turn into the final released Tinkerbell movie and then according to this article article even when they decided a scrap ring of belief they had the studio in India keep working on it because if they canceled it they would still have to pay out the contract so like it wouldn't be saving any money by having them stop working on it and then they hoped that they would be able to reuse some of it which if that's true does that mean that the studio in India finished ring of belief like there's a finished version of Ring of belief sitting on a hard drive somewhere that's crazy and then John Lasseter had Brittany Murphy replaced with May Whitman May Whitman voiced Katara and avatar The Last Airbender which I did not watch but I know is beloved so I feel like that's an important credit for me to mention and so the story of this new Tinkerbell movie was obviously very different from ring of belief these were changing 90 of it it involves the fairies being responsible for the changing of the seasons on the mainland so like at the beginning of every season the fairies have to travel to the mainland and like make the flowers bloom and paint the spots on the ladybugs and kick start all of the changes to Nature that happens when the seasons change in one article Raymond said that working with Lassiter was like a dream come true and that Lassiter created the idea that fairies go to the mainland and change the seasons which is interesting to me I feel like the story beats of the fairies changing the seasons on the mainland is very similar to the fairies being Wing maidens and inspiring children on the mainland because in both ring of belief and the released Tinkerbell movie the fairies have to go to the mainland to do an important job but Tinkerbell isn't allowed to go and so she sort of Breaks the Rules trying to figure out a way that she can go and by doing that kind of stupid thing she ruins everything and now all the fairies are kind of in trouble and she has to fix it but she does fix it and so in the end she gets to go to the mainland and she interacts with a human girl which in the released Tinkerbell movie is Wendy from Peter Pan mommy guess what guess yes Wendy what is it darling and so this plot makes strong Laster feel hypocritical to me because like you're okay with the fairies bringing Seasons to the mainland but not imagination I feel like the seasons thing is just the wing maidens thing but with less basis in the existing lore also you're fine with Wendy getting a cameo so like there's an amount of Peter Pan that Laster would have been okay with in the movies he just wasn't okay with the extent to which the Peter Pan characters were involved in the ring of belief one of the movies in the Tinkerbell franchise is Like An Origin story of Captain Hook Lasseter was okay with that I guess there was a canceled seventh film in the series that was going to have Tinkerbell meeting Peter Pan now it was canceled but I don't think it's because Jon Laster didn't like it it was because the entire Studio shut down because they stopped making money so like I won't support a movie with Peter Pan in it really did you change your mind on that so to recap the behind the scenes drama Disney toon Studios made buckets of money for Disney as overseen by Sharon Morrell then she and her team made a Tinkerbell movie almost finished it then John Laster comes in and is able to get the whole thing scrapped because he did not want Peter Pan in a movie about Tinkerbell the famous Peter Pan character and then he had a different version of the movie made which is in many ways quite similar to the movie he just scrapped and like articles from this time around 2007 to 2008 talking about the production of Tinkerbell I'll talk about how Jon Laster came in and saved the Tinkerbell movie John Laster was quoted as saying it was virtually unwatchable and everyone just takes his word for it and they're like well we love John Laster because we love Pixar so I'm sure that Tinkerbell movie must have been a real stinker how nice of him to come in and fix it and then the final version of the Tinkerbell movie comes out and everyone's like well I mean it's not good but imagine how much worse it would have been if Jon Laster didn't get involved and a lot of Articles mention that the reason the original was scrapped was because it was skewing too young and the story was too Juvenile and they wanted the Tinkerbell franchise to appeal to girls older than the Target demographic for the princesses which I think is not true at all because the original ring of belief is if anything too dark I don't think it would have appealed to very little kids I think it would have appealed to an older demographic I don't know the source for this alleged reason that ring of belief was craft but I think it's made up and also I've watched the final version of Tinkerbell and I don't think it's very good I don't think we like got a masterpiece I don't think it was worth it to scrap ring of belief because the movie we got instead was so great I think they both would have been bad in different ways but I think that scrapping ring of belief is so wasteful and disrespectful of everybody's time you see this number thrown around that Disney had to scrap 30 million dollars worth of animation and like I don't think it was worth it to scrap 30 million dollars worth of Animation I think it would have been fine if you kept it the way it is I think it probably would have been equal in quality at least story-wise I think the animation that we've seen from ring of belief does look more polished I think because the final Tinkerbell movie was so rushed to be clear I don't want to make it seem like I think that we lost out on some amazing Tinkerbell movie because ring of belief was scrapped I think it would have had its own problems but I think that scrapping a movie to make a similar and equally flawed if in some ways worse movie was a waste of time and money the final part of the story is that then Cher Morrell was five shared well I mean she was moved to a different department because they didn't want to buy out her contract but she was removed from her job and then a few months later no longer worked at Disney and basically everybody agrees that conflicts with John Laster over the Tinkerbell movie is why she was fired which I also don't want this to come across as I think that Sharon Morrell was some sort of hapless victim I think she didn't handle the production well even before Jon Laster came on going through a dozen directors and two dozen scripts and then once John Laster came on I don't think she acted as professionally as she should have I think that Tinkerbell became sort of a passion project for her and so she was not willing to compromise or play nice if she was smart or less emotionally invested she should have gone okay this is what my boss wants me to do with this movie so I'm gonna try and make it happen and not go behind his back or argue with him but there's a part of me that still feels like John Lasseter just was not into her version of the movie at all I think it's possible that there's an alternate universe where she did play nice and make changes and he still just wasn't into it I don't want to turn this into like a sexism thing but we do know that Jon Laster famously has problems respecting women in the workplace and he meets this female executive disagrees with her on every element of her project and the second a man comes in with a different idea he's all for it I don't know I might be reading into it but I think it probably didn't help that Cheryl Morrell was a woman you know so that's the story of Ring of belief I think it's a really unique story just because of how much drama and fighting there was behind the scenes and also because of how much material we have from this scrapped movie I'm not a huge lost media person but I feel like it is uncommon to have so much public material I think it's in part because it was so close to being completed which I think is a shame I'm very curious as to what ring of belief would have been like because you saw my plot reconstruction there's still a lot of unanswered questions and I also always feel bad with creative projects like this because I feel like most of the work that an artist does for a company whether it's developing animation or a doll line most of the time it never gets greenlit or it doesn't make it that far into production and it never sees the light of day and so all this work that artists have worked so hard on import a lot of creativity and heart into just gets lost to time and so I also just want to appreciate all of the art that we do have from ring of belief because especially a lot of the early Pixie Hollow Concepts I think are just so beautiful so if you happen to have worked on the Tinkerbell franchise and have any stories about it or any art sitting on your hard drive please share it I would love to hear more about this project and um if you have a copy of the movie sitting somewhere email me um I don't know how to end a YouTube video so bye also I think Sean Laster is a creep

Channel: sarahserif

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Length: 67min 33sec (4053 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023