An Interview With The Filmmakers Of Disney’s The Pirate Fairy! #PirateFairy

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On my recent Disney Media Trip I not only got the opportunity to visit Disney Toon Studios, But I got the chance to see an advanced screening of Disney’s The Pirate Fairy. It’s Disney’s upcoming straight to Blu-Ray release that will set sail April 1, 2014.

The film was highly entertaining for me for a few reasons…

First and foremost Peter Pan is my all time FAVORITE Disney film! I’ll see anything that is in that realm of characters. My family loves it too!

It has Tinkerbell and all the fabulous fairies we’ve come to love in the Disney Fairy movies.

It stars Tom Hiddleston as the voice of a character named James that would ultimately become Captain James Hook! He is a fabulous Hook to say the least. I’ll see anything Tom is in because I know it’s sure to be an amazing performance. He sings too! Check out this video below of Tom in action!

It may or may not have one of the most adorable origin stories of one of Peter Pan’s most beloved characters.

If you haven’t heard about the film here is a little about it:

From the world of “Peter Pan” comes “The Pirate Fairy,” a swashbuckling new adventure about Zarina (voice of Christina Hendricks), a smart and ambitious dust-keeper fairy who’s captivated by Blue Pixie Dust and its endless possibilities. When Zarina’s wild ideas get her into trouble, she flees Pixie Hollow and joins forces with the scheming pirates of Skull Rock, who make her captain of their ship. Tinker Bell (voice of Mae Whitman) and her friends must embark on an epic adventure to find Zarina, and together they go sword-to-sword with the band of pirates led by a cabin boy named James (voice of Tom Hiddleston), who’ll soon be known as Captain Hook himself. With laughter, heart, magic and thrills.

This film is very entertaining for both boys, girls, and adults. You’ll have to run out and pick up your copy of the Blu-Ray to see for yourself.

Visiting Disney Toon Studios is always fun as they always decorate the studio with which ever film they are working on.

It’s great to see all the concept art for the film on display.

After the screening and taking a quick tour of the studios it was off to chat with the filmmakers of The Pirate Fairy, Director Peggy Holmes and Producer Jenni Magee-Cook about the casting of the film!

This is an amazing movie with an amazing cast. How did the casting go about?

Peggy:

Well the Fairies Franchise series, our main girls Tinker Bell, Silvermist, Rosetta, Iridessa, Fawn and Vidia have all been cast since the beginning. We have Jason Henkel here who’s like our casting director. And he’s fantastic. And then in this particular case, the cast we added which was Christina Hendricks and Tom Hiddleston, we worked with Jason, we talked about sort of what we wanted the, what the characters were like. And then he brings a list to us and in this case..

Jenni:

Number one and number one.

Peggy:

In this case they are our top picks for each character, which was incredible.

Jenni:

 It’s unusual to get your top picks and it was amazing.

Peggy:

Do you want to talk about Christina a little bit?

Jenni:

We really wanted that character to come to life. We really wanted you to like her and we wanted to find a character that was likeable but yet you could understand made a big mistake, and goes away. But also had to be powerful, I mean, she’s a seven inch fairy fighting pirates. So she’s got to be vulnerable and sweet out front. But then she’s got to be tough when she’s a pirate.  It took a really big range of acting and Christina Hendricks is amazing. And we all knew her from Mad Men and we knew she could have that sharp tone, tough wit, but she has such a sensitive soft side to her also. And she has such a passion for this passion and really excited by coming in and doing a fairy. She’s a huge Disney fanatic, so remember we showed her around the building and we were in the story room showing her art and  she just was totally in the story about how it dawned on her. She was going to be a fairy. And that was huge, ’cause her and her husband go to Disneyland I guess all the time. And they don’t have kids and then so they love it. And so to become a fairy and part of the Disney legend, she was just thrilled to do and you can see that on the screen what she brought.

Peggy:

Tom Hiddleston was our first choice yes and he did it, which was just amazing. And one of the great things about Tom is first of all he’s a triple threat right. he can sing dance and act, which is amazing. He’s got a really extensive education background at RADA and things like that. And so one of the things that Tom really understood for this character is that Hook is a bigger than life character, right. We listened to the original book Hans Conried and what Tom understood very clearly was that was a big performance but believable for the day. Right, it was a completely believable villain for the day. And that’s what Tom understood was how to then get a bigger than life character, a bigger than life performance that was believable for today’s audience. Tom got that right off the bat.  He had so much fun giving us little glimpses of the big laughs because hook is only twenty something years old in this film. Our thought was, you know, he’s like twenty two, something like that, Hook is not as bitter and evil as he is in Peter Pan yet. He hasn’t had all the failures. But you can see he’s going to start to have a lot of failures and a lot of things that go wrong for him. And he’s got big ideas that just don’t work out. So Tom really had a handle on kind of how to make this character super charming and loyal and very unassuming. And then make that flip, which was great.

It’s so interesting to learn about how the actors bring these amazing characters to life.  I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at Disney’s Pirate Fairy. It was so great to learn and chat with these amazing film makers!

Disney’s The Pirate Fairy is out April 1, 2014.  Run out and get your copy!

I was provided an all expense paid trip by Disney to attend this event. All opinions are my own.