So here's my review of the second Tinkerbell movie, "Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure"
The first movie involved the change from winter to spring. This one involves the change from summer to autumn, so... about six months have passed.
The movie opens up with Terrence, the Dust Keeper fairy who helped Tink reconsider running off into exile in the previous movie, and his Dust Keeping co-workers (including his boss, Fairy Gary, because Queen Clarion apparently had a naming theme going at some point) are ribbing him about the amount of time he spends hanging out with Tinkerbell. Confronting the issue head-on works to preempt any shipping complaints. After Terrence and Tink play around with crashing one of her inventions, Tink is summoned to appear before the Queen. Terrence teases "Someone's in trouble..." Tink "Hey, I haven't done anything... Lately." Terrence "The stinkbug incident?"
Tink, before the Queen can say anything, blurts out "It's not my fault your highness, those stinkbugs were askin' for it!" LOL. Nice redirect on the joke.
So it turns out that every eight years there's a blue moon (literally), and when the light from this moon hits the Moonstone (which the fairies just happen to have), blue pixie dust is created. This blue pixie dust revitalizes the pixie dust tree, which is the source of all the regular gold-colored pixie dust in the fairy world (not counting Queen Clarion's dress). Every time this event comes up, one group of fairies gets the honor of creating a decorative staff to hold the Moonstone, and this year it's the Tinker Fairies turn at bat, and as luck would have it the Tinkers just recently acquired a hero in the form of Tinkerbell, who saved spring (after ruining it). The Minister of Autumn is a little concerned because the Moonstone is ridiculously fragile (not sure exactly how they know that) and Tink is something of a loose cannon. But Fairy Mary and Queen Clarion insist that Tink is the absolute perfect fairy for the job. Doesn't help that Tink almost smashed the Moonstone five seconds after taking possession.
Tink can't wait to share the news with Terrence, and as it turns out, Terrence is kind of an expert on the Moonstone (pixie dust is his thing), so he volunteers to assist Tinkerbell. It's a dream team combination. In an amusing sequence of events, prolonged close proximity causes Tink's opinion of Terrence to shift from "cute" to "annoying as hell" and Tink seems ready to murder him.
Desperate for some breathing room, Tink sends Terrence on an errand to find her a "sharp thing". When he returns too quickly with a human-sized pocket compass, she derides his find for being round, the exact opposite of sharp (against his protests), and dismissively knocks the heavy instrument into her finally-completed staff, smashing it and destroying weeks of her work. She blows up on Terrence, and Terrence is tired of putting up with her shit so he leaves. Furious, Tink kicks the pocket compass, and the spring-loaded case flips open, smashing the precious Moonstone into rubble. Whoops.
After Tink fails in an attempt to fix the Moonstone with glue, she has the idea to visit Fairy Mary, currently attending the fairy theater, and casually ask if they have... you know... a spare Moonstone. Goodness no, it's one-of-a-kind and the Pixie Dust Tree would literally die without it. You didn't lose it, did you? Nope, Tink didn't "lose" it. Phew. Okay then, relax and enjoy the show.
The performers tell a tale of pirates who once got their hands on a fairy treasure, a mirror that can grant three wishes, but their ship was wrecked before they could cash in the third wish. Tink asks Fairy Mary if this story is fact or fiction, and Fairy Mary says it's 100% real. The story conveniently also contains directions on how to find the mirror, although Tink slips out before she can hear a final line of warning. On the face of it this seems like a really cheap way to move the plot along, but at second glance these
aren't convenient directions for how to find the mirror, they're a historical record of a trip Tink hasn't made yet (there's a clear difference once you realize it). It goes completely unsaid, but some fairy's evidently been dabbling in prophecy. It's a little detail which makes a weak spot in the story perfectly acceptable and seems somehow admirable.
Preparing for her covert mission, Tink realizes that she doesn't have enough fairy dust to make it there and back. Fairy Gary won't budge on her rations, and her friends point her to the very obvious fairy to ask for pixie dust favors, Terrence. When she asks him for more pixie dust but he's hesitant to hand it over because she can't say why she needs it, she says that a real friend would do it no-questions-asked, and he says that a real friend wouldn't ask him to be negligent in his job without telling him why, and they both conclude that they must not have been as good friends as they thought they were.
On her way home, Tink drops her pixie dust bag in a cotton field, but rather than being yet another disaster, it inspires her to create a cotton-based hot air balloon, and now she's found herself a way to cover the distance without the need for extra pixie dust.
En route to the treasure, Tink picks up a traveling companion, a firefly named Blaze (who she's frequently a jerk to), loses her balloon and her supplies, and salvages the needle from the compass to use as a sword (proving how Terrence really did bring her a "sharp thing").
Terrence meanwhile visits a wise owl looking for advice on how to patch things up with Tink. They do the old joke where rather than talking, the owl constantly asks "Who?" and the advice-seeker talks themselves into their own solution, crediting the wisdom of the owl. The joke kind of falls flat and doesn't add a nice spin like some of the others. Now resolved to be the one to swallow his pride and apologize first, Terrence visits Tink's home. But he finds her absent, with a smashed staff and some broken shards of Moonstone on her floor, along with blueprints, plans, and a copy of her itinerary.
Back on the quest, there's a bit of a useless scene where Tink is blocked by two argumentative trolls guarding a troll bridge, and when she explains her story they call her out for dumping Terrence, because friends don't break up over stupid little arguments, friends apologize and get over it. Tink slips past as they start up a new argument.
When Tink finally reaches the wreck and the treasure, she finds the mirror, and... "Blaze, I wish you would be quiet for one minute." Poof, Tink's friend and ally is now mute for 60 seconds. Final wish granted. Tink angrily blames Blaze for destroying the world, but looking in the mirror, she sees her angry face and realizes that it wasn't Blaze who caused this, it was her. Sorry Blaze. She wishes Terrence was there, and his face appears in the mirror. She takes the opportunity to clear the air between them, and wishes he was
really there, not just a face in a magic mirror, but... he is there. He's standing right behind her. He read her itinerary and only just now caught up with her (kind of an old joke, could've used a twist). Let's just say that pointy elf ears are bad at picking out the direction of sound when it comes from behind.
After some swashbuckling with rats, Tink/Terrence/Blaze make it to the balloon Terrence recovered and make their way home. But what to do about the end of the world? You're kinda gonna get blamed for something like that. But a little bit of Blaze's firefly light gives Tink an idea.
Tink and Terrence crash the ceremony in the nick of time, coming down in a showy hot air balloon, and unveil the new scepter. Shockingly smashed, yet combined with diamond prisms and decorative pieces from the formerly-magic mirror, the flattened pieces of Moonstone now have greater surface area, and the fairy world's production of blue pixie dust has just increased dramatically. Tink has again snatched a lasting victory from the jaws of disaster.
Celebrations abound. Vidia makes an appearance and Tink's friends give her a ribbing about Tink being the big hero again, and she takes it with some "Yeah, whatever" dismissiveness, but away from prying eyes she's really very happy, further cementing Vidia as a complicated character, not a villain.
Overall, I'm not sure if I like this movie more or less than the first one. I'd say it depends on my mood. I really like how the first Tinkerbell movie doesn't do any more than it needs to do, and everything it does, it does well. This sequel is trying to do more. It's trying to go bigger. I would say that it has more moments that I like, but it has some moments that fall flat. It makes it hard to rank the two of them, but they're both good movies which convinced me that Disneytoon had turned a page and made me eager to see what comes next.
