Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue

A fun, free-spirited straight-to-video project, "Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue" is fine family entertainment that you'll be proud for your kids to watch again and again.

This is, as you may have guessed, a solo effort for Tink, and is part of a series of prequel films to Disney's classic "Peter Pan" (for the record, this is the third of 5; if you're counting at home, that makes it the sequel to the sequel of the prequel). Pete is nowhere to be found, and Tink (voice of Mae Whitfield) is part of a fairy community that includes her friends Rosetta (Kristen Chenoweth), Iridessa (Raven Symone), Silvermist (Lucy Liu) and Vidia (Pamela Adlon).

This Tink is less cantankerous than we may be used to , but is prone to getting in trouble. Fairies live out their days flitting among the flowers, helping bees, painting butterflies, and otherwise horsing around while trying to stay hidden from humans, who of course view them as...fairy tales (why they must stay hidden is kind of a mystery, but you could surmise people would hurt, imprison or otherwise destroy them).

Tink finds herself trapped in the house of Lizzy (Lauren Mote), who is enamored with fairy tales but is the daughter of a believe-what-you-see scientist (Michael Sheen) who is annoyed by her flights of fancy.

Herein lies the best of the film; the relationship between a loving, even doting, father and the daughter he notices just enough to shove her away from her childhood and into the stuffy, boring world of adulthood. As a scientist, he is enamored with nature and butterflies, and keeps a hand-drawn field guide to record his observations. Lizzy does as well, and keeps her own field guide, but her father is too blinded by the rational to see the great work she is doing.

The CG animation works well for the Blu ray format, perhaps not as refined as, say, Pixar or DreamWorks, but is every bit as magical as it needs to be for the small-screen format.

Tink and her friends are an appropriately marketable clan, who, other than Tink are not particularly distinguishable from each other to a layman, but have flecks of personality that don't always come through.

"Rescue" is a movie about loyalty, friendship, and in that science-vs.-belief in what you can't see theme do I detect a veiled reference to religion?

Eh, maybe I'm reading too much into it.

The film is available as a Blu ray/DVD combo pack, which means you get both formats in one package as per Disney's standard. Extras allow viewers to design their own fairy house, along with a selection of deleted scenes, a music video for the song "How to Believe," featured in the film, and a fairy field-guide designer.

Film: 3.5 Yaps Extras: 3.5 Yaps