Just a Little Pixie Dust

Andreas Deja gave further artistic support to Raymond’s design team. “Redesigning the character in CG wasn’t easy. We wanted her silhouette to look and feel like Tinker Bell, so we had Andreas look at it. He gave us a very detailed chalk talk on some key elements in her design. He had talked with Marc Davis numerous time about his design of Tinker Bell, so it was almost like having Marc Davis there showing us how to draw her.”

To give Tink’s home a fairy feel, the task fell upon art director Fred Warter to create something unique. “The different settings are part of the magic of relating to these characters,” says Raymond. “When we start off in London, it’s a little more realistic. Pixie Hollow, though, is in the mountains of Never Land. We wanted to keep that same style, and the mountains in the distance are the rounded mountains from Never Land, but we wanted it to stand on its own. We used art neuveau styles to give it a slightly more stylistic world. There are a lot of curves and straights in the lines, echoing Mary Blair’s concept sketches of Peter Pan.” Warter also created a color script for the film, which gives visual clues that follow Tinker Bell’s journey.

The film was written and designed at the DisneyToon Studios in Burbank and animated by Prana, a studio in India, working on the Maya platform. The production team took a few trips overseas, but mostly relied on video conferencing to compensate with the thirteen-hour time difference. Raymond estimates around five hundred people in total worked together to meet their 20-month production schedule.

“It was a little daunting to tackle the film,” concludes Raymond, “but with John Lasseter and a great crew throughout the process, it was a chance of a lifetime. It was an incredible honor to see her origin story, and it makes it a bit easier when you have a great character to start with.”