Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 creator on the big fairy transformations

Season one of The Winx Saga and Fate It was established that although many main characters are fairies, hundreds of years had passed since any fairy had ever been transformed with wings and all. This contrasted sharply with the original animated series in which the main characters were fairies and underwent colorful, magical-girl transformations whenever they utilized their full powers. As they gained new abilities, their transformations got more complex.

This live-action production transforms the animated cartoon into something darker and more serious, but there are no bright eyes. That meant no magical transformations — at least initially.

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Fate: The Winx Saga]

Image by Netflix

The final episode of season 1 saw fire fairy Bloom (Abigail Cowen), transform into her fairy form with glowing eyes and blazing flame wings. Polygon’s showrunner Brian Young explains to Polygon that transformations are something that Brian Young and her creative team have always kept in mind. They wanted to make it right.

“We started the process back in season 1 with Bloom, because we knew we wanted that to be sort of a big surprise at the end of season 1,” he explains. “And then season 2, we were like, OK, so now, we’ve got to do this multiple times. In order for it to have emotional heft we needed to up the stakes a little bit.”

It is a huge deal. Sailor MoonYoung is a huge fan and understands the significance of magical transformations for girls. He set out to raise the bar in season 2. Three fairy transformations were possible at once, which was the solution that Young and Terra found. Water fairy Aisha, earth fairy Terra, and light fairy Stella rush to Bloom’s rescue. They embrace all their emotions — the good and the bad — and finally unlock their full power to defeat the bad guy. They’re all different types of fairies, which means that their transformations all look different. Aisha’s, for instance, involves swirling water that manifests into fountain-like wings.

“We always talk about it like a music video,” says Young. “I’ve got a picture of the storyboards for it and the whole sequence was massive, and we shot so much footage of all the girls on all these different rigs with all these different backgrounds. We conceptualize ideas once the VFX process begins. Is that what their wings look like. How do they look? And it’s a pretty big undertaking and it’s a conversation that sort of starts prior to us even shooting.”

Steffan Hill/Netflix Photo

Young was aware that even though transformations can be expensive and complicated, he wanted to preserve them because they were essential to the success of the show. He talked with length with the original cartoon’s creator, Iginio Straffi, about what made Winx stand out, and Straffi always guided him back to the same point. It This wasn’t just the magic and fashion (though a lot of it was Fashion and magic.

“At its core, the Winx Club is about friends,” says Young. “It’s about friendship, it’s about these girls, going through these, not just life and death experiences, but heartbreak, and romance and love and turning to each other, and having this sort of protective little unit. The suite is a perfect place to be normal, even when everything else goes crazy. Making sure that we preserved those friendships was really important.”

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