Return to Never Land (Pixie-Powered Edition)

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(5 stars) - Return to Never Land (Pixie-Powered Edition)
My 3 yr. old Toddler loves this movie !!! We watch it (Too) often !!!!!

(1 stars) - Military Fam hated it!
I have a sweet 5 year old girl and a 2 1/2 year old boy. Their father is deployed and DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS MOVIE to any military families!!!! As a mother I should have viewed it first but I thought....I love Disney movies and that's all we watch and it's rated G! The main character Jane was a little too much for me. I kept thinking...please don't let my little girl immitate Jane. Not to mention the opening is a family saying goodbye to their father going off to war. Hit too close to home and my daughter doesn't understand 'war'. Did I already mention that I did not like the Jane character or the movie?

(3 stars) - Deeply Stale
Return to Neverland / B000VE4UBA

I like Disney sequels and prequels, I really do. At least sometimes. The Little Mermaid 2 and Ariel's Beginning were superb, as well as The Lion King 2, and each dealt carefully with issues that arose out of the previous movies. Return to Neverland, on the other hand, seems stale, flat, and dull - a soulless retread of the original.

The premise was a good one. Wendy's daughter, raised in a much more adult world, one defined by war, has no time for fairy tales. Robbed of a childhood, she is frustrated with her younger brother, and fears that the "silly nonsense" in his head may bring him to harm. When she finds herself transported by force into Neverland (in an absolutely eye-rollingly awful scene involving Hook, a flying ship, and a kidnapping scheme gone wrong), she is simply not ready to appreciate the fairy-tale-come-true world she finds herself in. Unfortunately, in order to leave, she must learn how to love Neverland, because only fairy dust (and faith!) will allow her to fly home.

With such a promising premise, it's hard to say how this movie went so wrong. The personalities seem to be sucked out of the characters. The Lost Boys are indistinguishable from one another (even more so than in the first movie), which is really just inexcusable when more recent efforts have shown that it doesn't need to be this way. Peter himself has no charm at all, none of the boyish delight that causes people to love him in spite of his faults. Tinkerbell has become a simpering sweet caricature of herself, apparently in preparation for her own movie in which Disney has decided to whitewash her into a sweet little fairy instead of the vibrant miniature woman Barrie imagined her to be. Hook has lost a great deal of character, too - where he was smooth, cruel, and calculating, he is now a bumbling fool and seems more comic relief than genuine menace. Apparently, this was an attempt to "tone down" the movie for younger audiences, but I do not believe it was a wise decision. Nor was the "swap" from crocodile to octopus, which is just painfully bad to watch.

You won't see much of Neverland here. The "Indian camp" has been razed to the ground, with nary a soul in sight, presumably because Disney couldn't figure out how to respectfully treat the natives and decided to bypass the issue. Again, more recent Peter Pan movies have managed to do this just fine, so it's a shame that Disney couldn't be bothered. Most of the sets - the mermaid lagoon, the tree house, the beach - fly by in quick succession as the paper-thin story plods along: Jane must be made to learn to relax and "have fun" before she can appreciate Neverland, believe in fairies (and save Tinkerbell's life), and go home. ("Faith!! Trust!! And pixie dust!!" is shouted so often that my teeth began to stand on edge.)

I had hoped this would be a pro-female movie, but without the "perfect princess" platform that Disney usually relies on. Jane seems a good candidate for a "just as good as a boy" type of story where Peter and Jane both realize that they have a lot to learn from each other (even if Peter cannot learn to be serious, he could at least confront his own internal issues with females). No attempt is made at mutual self-discovery, however - Jane is "taught" that she needs to lighten up and stop being so serious and that's the end of it. The superficial "lesson" leaves the viewer unsatisfied and it would have been better if a little more depth had been expended to highlight the fact that there is a time and a place for both silliness AND seriousness, and that one must be wise to know which is which.

This movie is closed captioned for the hearing impaired.

(5 stars) - Good Deal
I am a member of the Disney Movie Club and was going to buy this from them but it was much cheaper on Amazon.

(3 stars) - not as good as original
I bought this for my kids ages 3, 6 and 8. They are all big fans of Peter Pan. None of them cared for this movie-I was surprised. I have no complaints on the quality of the movie.

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