Recently Sammy has been re-watching the Tinker Bell movies and since we’ve seen them a thousand times now, I’ve begun to pick them apart. The thing I find most inconsistent are the rules of pixie dust and how it applies to fairies.
From the very first movie we learn that if you sprinkle pixie dust on something it will float. Excellent, pixie dust = flight. We back this up in the second movie by showing that Tink needs extra dust to get her dirigible to a far off island and then might be stuck there once she loses her bag of dust.
All good so far? Great. Because now we get to the third movie and everything goes out the window. At the beginning of this movie, Vidia gets her wings wet and is then unable to fly. Indeed this becomes the crutch the rest of the script leans upon to prevent Tink’s friends from easily rescuing her. But why? Why do fairies need wings at all? Why can’t they just get sprinkled with pixie dust and fly. Later in the movie, Tink coats a girl with pixie dust which allows her to fly around her room. The girl doesn’t grow wings in order to fly, so why do fairies need them? Later in the movie they need to get the girl and everyone else to London to save Vidia from the girl’s dad, so they put a rain coat on her and then coat her in dust. Shouldn’t they put the dust on her and then put the rain coat on? Otherwise won’t the dust just get washed off by the rain? If not, why didn’t they just coat themselves in dust and fly to the house where Tink was being held captive? Of course we ignore this plot hole and everything works out fine.
This brings us to the pirate fairy movie. We start by reiterating that a fairy can’t fly without dust. Which again begs the question, what are the point of the wings? Later we once again go through the wet wings means no flying issue. But follow it up shortly after by once again sprinkling someone with pixie dust which immediately gives them the power of flight without wings. We even make a whole pirate ship fly by the end of the movie with just dust. And of course the bad guy at the end comes back after you think he’s gone because he’s been coated in dust.
In the end the way to defeat him is to get him wet to wash off his dust. Which brings me back to an issue with the 3rd movie. When the friends are trudging through the rain to save Tink, I can accept that they can’t fly If we assume that the rain is washing the dust off of them. But as they are being chased by a cat, one is bumped and coats a bunch of dishes with dust which then begin to fly immediately. Where did this dust come from? If it was on his wings, shouldn’t it have been washed off in the rain?
What I’ve been able to determine is that fairies for some reason require pixie dust and wings to fly, but everyone/everything else just requires dust (except Peter Pan who doesn’t seem to require either for some reason). And dust can be washed off by a wall of ocean water, but not by torrential rain.