Disney Fairies Celebrating Sinterklaas

Disney Fairies celebrating Sinterklaas

Because I always see a lot of posts about holidays like Hallowe’en and Thanksgiving, I thought it would be fun to explore the Disney Fairies celebrating one of my country’s national holidays that’s happening tonight: Sinterklaas (shortly: a kind of Secret Santa where creative ‘surprise’ packaging and a witty accompanying poem are more important than the gift itself).

Tink makes the craziest surprises, with all kinds of functionalities, levers that open secret compartments, etc. As she puts so much effort into these, she completely forgets that she’s also supposed to write poems until the celebration is already underway, but everyone is okay with that, as her surprises make up for it.

Sil still secretly believes in Sinterklaas (they all know, but no one has the heart to tell her), and as such is deeply honoured to be his helper and fix presents for her friends. Her poems are short and sweet, mostly commemorating the good times they’ve had; her surprises are a mess of tape and glue only vaguely resembling something, but it’s really the thought that counts.

Dess does everything by the book. Neatly put together surprises, rhythmically sound poems that are careful not to insult anyone. As a result, her presents are a bit boring compared to the others’. She sees this, but resolves to fix it the next year by making everything even more perfect, failing to grasp that that’s not the point. She did once prank Fawn with a blitz package – once Fawn had regained her sight, she was very impressed.

Fawn absolutely loves to yank everyone’s wings with surprises that double as practical jokes and witty poems that poke fun at the recipient. She has put Rosetta’s present in some kind of filthy substance (mud, squirrel poo, crushed insect skins, a literal can of worms) on more than one occasion, to the latter’s intense displeasure. On one memorable instance she managed to sent Clank on a wild goose chase throughout Pixie Hollow for half the evening until eventually the others took pity on him and got him back.

Ro kind of forgets about the whole having to make surprises and poems thing until just before the celebration, so her presents are usually rather quickly assembled. She does always try to get back at Fawn, but mostly fails; once, she wrapped Fawn’s gift in layers and layers of beautiful petal and dandelion fluff dresses (if she wouldn’t wear them, at least she would have to take them off one by one), but Fawn, not grasping what Ro was trying to do, enthusiastically ripped through the entire bulk at once, leaving Ro horrified.

Vidia is surprisingly good at writing poems (“I spend all year thinking up insults for you, darlings, at some point you put them to rhyme just to shake things up a little”) and everyone can already tell by the first strophe when a poem comes from her. Her surprises are efficient – she doesn’t want to put too much effort in them, but she’ll be damned if they wouldn’t at least be considered ‘good’.

Terence really only joins the group’s celebration because it gives him an excuse to write a twenty page thinly veiled love poem to Tink (who remains completely oblivious, as he never has the guts to tell her it came from him and she just takes it as another of Fawn’s pranks). The rest of the group (save for Silvermist, who thinks it’s sweet) gets increasingly frustrated with this, especially since he only spares about eight lines for the rest of them.

Clank and Bobble do everything together: they tinker their surprises for the others together, they get their gifts together, they write their poems together. The only thing they do apart is their presents for each other, for which they actively have to schedule a time if they don’t want the other walking in on it. During their work, Bobble always hints heavily at what kinds of things he would like. These hints go completely over Clank’s head, but he knows his best friend and lover well enough to come up with something even better every time. Bobble in turn frets over getting something as great for Clank, but ends up with a simple gift, surprise and a poem describing how he had tried his hardest but Clank deserves so much more. It’s really the best present Clank could ever receive.

The Ballroom in Pixie Hollow Online during Sports Camp. This bothers me. Why is there a swimming pool? Isn’t it well established that fairies can’t swim because of their wings dragging them down? I mean, I know the movie-verse is a lot less strict in this than the book-verse, but at least it was shown that wet wings were undesirable (GFR, TPF). This is the first time I’ve seen a very clear sign that fairies do swim (at least in the game-verse, which one might argue is also slightly different from the movie-verse).

Or is this another instant of Disney blatantly ignoring Rani?

These are so beautiful, I love the colours and patterns in the backgrounds! My favourite of these is probably the Rani drawing, it’s so delicate

A few months ago I did a series of the old disney fairies, so I'm gonna post these here

Is that... is that book Terence and movie Terence simultaneously? What is happening?

This is the most important picture I’ve ever seen.

Christmas is weird with all my concerts cancelled. So for Second Christmas Day (or Boxing Day for you Britons out there) a little break from my usual work: this is an audio transcription of the soundtrack to Jazz Jackrabbit’s Candion, a.k.a. a wonderful interpretation of the classic ‘Carol of the Bells’. JJ was a big part of my childhood and this particular soundtrack was the first thing I ever fully audio transcribed (instead of just arranging it for piano). As always, while as close to the source material as possible considering I did this by ear, I’ve tried to write this down for life performance.

Original music by Mykola Leontovich, JJ soundtrack originally by Robert Allen & Joshua Jensen.

I got inspired by the old Fairies websites circulating around here and went and found a working version of the 2005/2006 Fairies website. Including two games, a guided tour through Pixie Hollow, information about all the main book fairies, and more. I’m screaming.

(sadly it’s all embedded though, so I couldn’t download it. But as long as you have a browser that accepts Flash, it should work!)