Winx Club: Magical Adventure

Winx member Princess Bloom lives in the kingdom of Domino after recently being reunited with her birth parents.  Her relationship with a handsome lad by the name of Sky seems to be going well until Sky's father forbids him from taking Bloom to the Princess Ball for mysterious reasons.  Bloom's father decides to hold tryouts to find a more suitable man for his daughter.  Meanwhile, the Ancestral Witches and the Trix team up to sap all of the positive magic from the Magic Dimension.  With more than just Sky-problems to deal with, can Bloom and the rest of the Winx girls restore the positive magic and regain their powers?

Unbeknownst to me, Winx Club is actually the first Italian cartoon to be sold and exported to America.  Now produced through Nickelodeon, storylines have been a bit adjusted from their original Italian airings.  This version of Magical Adventures clocks in at around 45 minutes while the Italian version is double that in length.  Much of that has to do with the aforementioned storyline edits and Nickelodeon trying to fit this movie into their reworked timeline.  Are you following all this?  I had no idea a kid's show could be so complicated.

The first thing that irked me was the cheap animation.  The digital age we currently live in has given rise to ugly computer animation that really dominates the children's landscape.  I doubt younger viewers even notice, but the lifeless backgrounds make it seem like the people behind Winx Club could really care less.  Even worse, the voicework is extremely wooden (imagine a cartoon soap opera) and it's pretty easy to tell that none of the cast recorded together.  Magical Adventures does have a lively pop soundtrack that young girls will enjoy and perhaps even sing along with.  Besides the television film, seven episodes from Season 5 of Winx Club are also included which makes this set far more reasonable compared to other bare-bones Nickelodeon releases.  Winx Club: Magical Adventures doesn’t provide much entertainment for adults, but it is a relatively harmless, wholesome program young girls will get a kick out of.