Note: This essay has been edited, and an additional section has been added.
Netflix is infamous for its disrespectful adaptations of existing properties, probably mostly because of its live-action version of Death Note. I regret to inform you that Netflix has recently decided to give its signature treatment to one of the best-loved magical-girl titles from outside Japan, the Italian cartoon Winx Club. The new Netflix series consists of six episodes, with the possibility of a second season.
I tried to watch it. Alas, this will not be a proper review because I couldn’t make it very far into this dreck.
But let’s start from the beginning: What even is Winx Club?
A Brief History of Winx Club
Winx Club is an Italian cartoon show, totaling seven seasons plus spinoffs. It is the brainchild of one Iginio Straffi, who took inspiration from Sailor Moon, Disney’s Tinkerbell, and the Harry Potter franchise. He nabbed elements from each, dumped them in a blender, and hired real-life fashion designers to do his characters’ outfits. The result was a long-running animated juggernaut that even boasts its own theme park.
The show was originally created with a combination of hand-drawn animation and CGI, but it moved to flash animation in its fourth season, which is also when Nickelodeon largely took over the property.
The protagonist is a girl named Bloom, who comes from somewhere on Earth called Gardenia. After she discovers that she is actually a magic fairy from a parallel universe (don’t ask), she is whisked away to study magic at Alfea, a school for fairies. She soon becomes BFFs with four (eventually six) other girls, and together they form the titular Winx Club. Each has a different elemental magical power, but all of them are giggly, fashion-obsessed teenagers.
The Magic Dimension contains two other schools. One is for boys, the so-called “Specialists,” who train to fight with laser swords and are the Winx’s romantic interests. The third is a school for dastardly witches, who are the fairies’ traditional enemies. Why the witch school is allowed to continue operating is one of the show’s many mysteries.
In magical-girl fashion, the Winx girls are able to transform: During their transformation sequences, they sprout wings and change outfits, though unlike most magical girls, they can wield magic even when not transformed. A typical episode climaxes with a transformation followed by a magical battle, in which a trio of witches called the Trix are the usual antagonists.
Iginio Straffi and his company Rainbow began work on Winx Club in the 1990s, though the project didn’t see the light of day until the early twenty-first century. A product of its time, it shows the influence of Bratz dolls and “hooker chic.” Still, it manages to develop a distinct look that isn’t quite like any of the other, similar cartoons.
That distinct look just happens to be “streetwalker.”
Anyway, its writing is flat-out terrible, and in its early seasons, it is hampered by nigh-unintelligible editing and—in the English version—a lackluster voice cast. But it filled a niche, and it has devoted fans to this day. It’s never overcome all of its basic problems, and I can’t claim to be a huge fan, but at its best, it has some nicely detailed artwork, and some of the outfits manage to be pretty.
The Desolation of Netflix
It’s not hard to imagine how a well-done live-action adaptation of Winx Club might go: It would have to be brightly colored and tongue-in-cheek with a chipper young cast of smiling girls who can with alacrity suffer the indignity of the story’s inherent silliness and skanky costumes. The transformation sequences would be deliberately campy. It might feature a few self-aware jokes, and it could shore up some of the source material’s basic writing mistakes, but it would be good, wholesome fun. In short, it might look like the live-action adaptation of Sailor Moon.
That, of course, is not what Netflix did. No, Netflix decided that Winx Club is the right material for a generic, moody, mean-spirited YA dystopia that looks exactly like every other generic, moody, mean-spirited YA dystopia.
How did Netflix screw this up? Let us count the ways.
The Title
First, the title. The Netflix version is entitled Fate: The Winx Saga. I imagine a group of Netflix executives sitting around a table, and the convo goes like this:
“Hey, we’ve really deviated from the source material here. We can’t just call it Winx Club. People will get confused.”
“Okay, how about we call it Fate? I am pretty sure, without looking, that there are no other franchises called Fate. Like, at all.”
This reminds me of that time some Hollywood idiot thought it would be a good idea to adapt Susan Cooper’s novel The Dark Is Rising and change the title to The Seeker. In fact, the blunders in Fate remind me of The Seeker in several ways.
The Rating
Right from the beginning, it’s obvious something is wrong: Load up an episode of Fate, and you will get a notice that it is rated TV-MA; that is, it’s for “mature audiences.” By contrast, the original Winx Club is rated TV-7.
And to make sure we know this show means business, in Fate‘s opening scene, a hapless shepherd gets seized by an unseen monster, resulting in a big blood splatter.
What the hell were they thinking?
The Costumes
As mentioned before, actual fashion designers worked on Winx Club. We may question some of their choices, but they at least managed to give the franchise a unique look. But Netflix, in its infinite wisdom, apparently instructed the cast members to show up in their regular street clothes because who needs a costuming department? Think of the money we can save if we just don’t have costumes.
Transformations
And since this show can’t do costumes correctly, it certainly can’t do a magical-girl transformation correctly. Here is Bloom transforming:
There you go, some cheesy CGI effects. Her clothes don’t even change. Whatever this is, this is not a magical-girl transformation sequence.
The Cinematography
Winx Club is known for its bright colors. Everything sparkles, and everything is in eye-popping hues. By contrast, Fate: The Winx Saga follows the obnoxious fad of desaturating everything. Just look at that screenshot up above: All the light is in the background, and the foreground is dark. They can’t even compose a group photo correctly.
The Cast
Honestly, I don’t hate the cast. Most of them might have been fine if they had better material to work with. Notably, Bloom, who is red-headed in the cartoon, is played by an actual redhead (Abigail Cowen). That’s unexpected: Hollywood has recently established a habit of casting formerly redhead characters with black actors, but it forebore in this instance.
However, Cowen is twenty-three and trying to play a teenager, and it shows, though she is not the most obviously too-old-for-this-shit member of the cast: That honor goes to Hannah van der Westhuysen, who plays the sun-fairy Stella; her exact age is not public information, but in some shots, she looks to be pushing forty.
Actually, the main reason I wanted to mention the cast is to mock other critics. Several writers, such as Caroline Framke at Variety, have complained that Fate cast a white actress to replace a Latina character but don’t bother to note that it also cast a black actress (Precious Mustapha) to play a character who was originally light-skinned. Mind you, I don’t care about the race of the cast; almost all of these characters are supposed to be magic fairies from another dimension, so they shouldn’t, strictly speaking, correspond to any real-world races anyway. I just wanted to point out the hypocrisy.
Note: A reader correctly points out that I misidentified the character Precious Mustapha is playing; I thought she was playing one of the original Winx Club members, but she’s actually portraying a character who, in the cartoon, was added later.
Painful Attempts to Be Hip
Fate: The Winx Saga is desperate to reassure you that it is a cool cat who is totally hep with the way you kids talk today, you dig? This results in so much bad dialogue that, as we said back in my day, I just can’t even.
Made-Up Words
When the show opens, Bloom, brand new to the magic realm, walks into Alfea and looks confused. The generic pretty-boy Sky (Danny Griffin) offers her some help, so she immediately accuses him of “mansplaining,” one of feminism’s favorite new baby-talk words. Worse still, even though she’s the only character in this show who’s supposed to be from Earth, he understands what she means.
The use of buzzwords is bad enough in itself, but this indicates a problem of worldbuilding: Although this show allegedly happens in a higher dimension, the writers cannot envision that dimension being preoccupied with concerns different from ours. It’s another world, but that other world is still going through Current Year.
I am reminded of the first episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which a girl from a hunter-gatherer tribe living on an ice floe calls her brother a “sexist.” I asked a few acquaintances why someone from a subsistence-level culture would even know, let alone have a use for, such a word. I was surprised when they appeared unable to understand the question.
That is a failure of imagination, an inability to envision a culture different from our own. And FYI, I discuss this at greater length in Pulp on Pulp.
Pop Culture References
I mentioned before that Winx Club takes inspiration from Tinkerbell and Harry Potter. Alas, the Netflix adaptation, having no capacity for subtlety, can’t help but make explicit mention of that.
The first instance is not so painful: When Bloom enters Alfea, she meets the headmistress and refers to Tinkerbell. It sort of works because the headmistress’s response suggests that Tinkerbell may have been a real fairy.
Decidedly more cringeworthy is Bloom’s conversation with Stella in which she starts fangirling about Harry Potter. Instead of staring at her blankly in incomprehension, this fairy from another dimension starts fangirling with her, and then they discuss which house the Sorting Hat would place them in, and HOLY SH*T READ ANOTHER BOOK ANY OTHER BOOK I SWEAR TO MADOKA.
Gratuitous Harry Potter references are played out. They were always awful, but now they carry a serious “how do you do fellow kids” vibe. They are doubly bad here because they make no sense: Why would Stella, who isn’t from Earth, know anything about Harry Potter? It is as if, in the original Star Wars, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker talked about how much they love Frank Herbert’s Dune. Absolutely do not write like this.
Trendy Technology
Fairies from another dimension are on Instagram. They cyberbully on Instagram. They post about fat acceptance and being gay on Instagram.
How do you do, fellow kids?
The Characters
In the original show, the Winx girls are besties by the end of the first episode, and like many cartoons for girls, Winx Club runs on the theme that friendship is the greatest force in the universe. I can understand why an adaptation might want to move away from such simplistic character dynamics, but Fate does it all wrong.
In Fate, from the moment the girls meet, they’re all sniping at or backbiting one another, with the result that they are all unlikeable and unpleasant. The problem is that there’s no motivation for this: Think about your first time at college, or at a job. Did you immediately start insulting your new roommates or coworkers? No, you tried to be pleasant and get along, and if there were any incompatibilities or conflicts, they appeared later.
Fate wants conflict between its characters but doesn’t earn it: It simply makes them fight for no reason, so they come across as antisocial and petty.
The Specialists
I think I’m about done here. I mean, this thing sucks, and I’ve already explained that it sucks …
I just have to talk a little about the Specialists. They were already the worst thing in the original show, but Netflix somehow makes them even worse than that.
In the cartoon, the Specialists exist for the sole purpose of being boyfriends for the Winx girls. They’re stupid, and they’re written with an exaggerated and inauthentic machismo that’s decidedly annoying (“I lifted weights for six hours, and then I passed out” —actual dialogue). Fate, however, somehow misses the point of the Specialists by depicting some of them as girls—and it also adds males to the cast of fairies, proving that the creators of Fate do not even know what the cartoon is about.
In the Netflix version, the Specialists are soldiers trained to fight off enemies called “Burned Ones,” which are CGI monsters that … um … burn people. I admittedly haven’t watched all of Winx Club, but a check of the Wiki tells me these monsters aren’t from the cartoon. So the Specialists are now a military organization that drives armored cars and fights non-canonical monsters. Oh, and there’s cyberbullying and gayness involved, just to make sure it has that edgy, YA-dystopia feel.
Conclusion
I’m out. That’s all I’ve got. I didn’t make it very far into this show, and I strongly suggest you don’t, either.
