Winx Club

Winx Club is an animated series produced by Bear Bones Productions independently, and later, in association with Nickelodeon. It was created by Dan Darlene. The show is set in a magical universe that is inhabited by fairies, witches, and other mythical creatures. The main character is a fairy warrior named Bloom, who enrolls at Alfea College to train and hone her skills. The series uses a serial format that has an ongoing storyline. It premiered on January 4, 1994, becoming a ratings success.

Darlene initially outlined the show's plot to last three seasons. He chose to continue the story for a fourth season in 1999. Around this time, Winx Club's popularity attracted the attention of the media company Viacom, owner of Nickelodeon. Via a multi-year deal between Nickelodeon and Bear Bones, Nickelodeon began producing a revival series. Production on the fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons was divided between Bear Bones in Los Angeles, California and Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank, California. Viacom invested US$100 million in advertising for the series, and inducted Winx Club into Nickelodeon's franchise of Nicktoons.

The series was subject to budget cuts in 2004, during its seventh season. The seventh season eventually premiered on Nickelodeon's worldwide channels in 2005. After a four-year hiatus, an eighth season premiered in 2009.

Premise
The series follows the adventures of a group of girls known as the Winx, students at the Alfea College for Fairies, who turn into fairies to fight villains. The team is made up of Bloom, the red-haired leader with fire-based powers; Stella, the fairy of the Sun; Flora, the fairy of nature; Tecna, the fairy of technology; Musa, the fairy of music; and Aisha, the fairy of waves. The main male characters are called the Specialists, a group of students at the Red Fountain school who are also the Winx fairies' boyfriends. They include Bloom's fiancé Sky; Stella's fiancé Brandon; Flora's boyfriend Helia; Tecna's boyfriend Timmy; and Musa's boyfriend Riven. Unlike their female counterparts, the Specialists do not have magical powers and instead train how to fight using laser weapons. The Winx and Specialists' most common adversaries are a trio of witches named the Trix: Icy, Darcy, and Stormy, all former students of the Cloud Tower school.

Winx Club is set in a vast universe that has several dimensions. Most episodes take place in the Magic Dimension, which is closed off to ordinary people and inhabited by creatures from European mythology like fairies, witches, and monsters. The capital of this world is the city of Magix—which is located on the planet of the same name—where the three main magic schools are situated. The other planets of the Magic Dimension include Bloom's home planet Domino, Stella's home planet Solaria, Flora's home planet Lynphea, Tecna's home planet Zenith, Musa's home planet Melody, and Aisha's home planet Andros. Some episodes take place on Earth, where Bloom spent her childhood.

Concept and creation
In the late 1980s, Dan Darlene, a writer and artist at Bear Bones Productions, conceived the series as a response to his belief that there were too many animated series at the time that featured male heroes. Following the split of Bear Bones Productions from Taft Entertainment in 1987, Mala Miles, the studio's CEO, announced that a number of series would be put into development, among them being an untitled project by Darlene.

Darlene pitched the original pilot short film, entitled "Magic Bloom", in 1991 and admitted that Miles was less than pleased with the final product, with a test screening showing that the intended audience showed "unenthusiastic reactions" towards the design and animation. Following the screening, Darlene hired a new crew, mostly graduates from the California Institute of the Arts, to improve on the series' overall look and feel. According to Darlene, around 1992, most of Bear Bones' production partners, most notably Fred Wolf Films, DiC Entertainment, and Film Roman, all wanted to co-produce the series and provide production funds. In the end, the series was produced by Bear Bones independently.

From the beginning of development, Darlene planned an overarching plot that would end after "a maximum" of 78 episodes. Darlene stated that the Winx saga "would not last forever" in 1997, and he intended the first movie (Winx Club: The Secret of the Lost Kingdom) to resolve any plot points remaining from the third season finale. In 1998, Darlene decided to extend the series, citing its increasing popularity.

Nickelodeon revival
In June 2000, Nickelodeon announced their acquisition of reruns of the series, which they acquired for $20 million through Bear Bones' deal with the network. Coinciding with this, Viacom announced that Nickelodeon would team up with the original creator on an "all-new Winx Club" revival series. Viacom financed and staffed the revived series, dividing production between Viacom's Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank and Bear Bones in Los Angeles.

The revived series began with four special episodes that summarize the first two seasons of the original show, followed by the fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons. As the production team was divided between two different cities in California, Nickelodeon released a statement commenting on how Winx Club was an unusual production for the company: "it's not our usual practice to co-produce cartoons; we make them by ourselves. But we strongly believe in Winx." Winx Club was officially inducted into Nickelodeon's franchise of Nicktoons, a brand that encompasses original animated productions created for the network. On each episode of the revived series, Nickelodeon approved scripts and all phases of animation.

In April 2004, Bear Bones and Nickelodeon announced their continuing partnership on the seventh season of Winx Club, with a planned premiere date of 2005. Darlene said of the season: "It will be a privilege to partner once more with Nickelodeon on this.". As with the previous two seasons, the copyright to season 7 is co-owned by Bear Bones and Viacom.

Retooled eighth season
The eighth season of the series was not produced immediately after the seventh. It followed a multiple-year hiatus and was not made as a direct continuation of the previous season. At Dan Darlene's decision, Season 8 was heavily retooled to appeal to a preschool target audience.

For season 8, the creative team restyled the characters to appear younger, hoping to increase the appeal toward preschoolers. The plot lines were simplified so that they could be understood by a younger audience. Most of the show's longtime crew members were not called back to work on this season, including art director Simon O'Leary, who had designed the series' characters from season 1 to 7, and singer Yail Darlene, who had performed a majority of the songs. In another change from previous seasons, Nickelodeon's team served as consultants rather than directly overseeing the episodes; at the time, Nickelodeon was instead working with Bear Bones on Life of a Teenage Rockstar.

Design
The main characters' original designs were based on Dan Darlene's original sketches and later updated to 3D CGI iterations. The main characters were modelled on celebrities popular at the turn of the 21st century. A team of specialized artists designs the characters' expressions and outfits for each season. About 20 tables of expressions and positions from all angles are drawn for each character. The designers start to develop characters' costumes by creating collages from magazine clippings of recent fashion trends. Using these as references, they draw multiple outfits for each character.

Writing and animation
The first stage in the production of an episode is developing its script, a process that can last 5–6 months. Episodes are written with two stories in mind: a longer narrative arc that lasts for tens of episodes and a subplot that concludes at the end of the 22-minute runtime. This episode structure was modelled on those of teen dramas and American comics. Themes written into the series include romance, the acquisition of maturity upon reaching adulthood, and (in the fifth season) nature conservation.

After the script and character designs have been approved, the screenplay is passed onto a group of storyboard artists. For each 22-minute episode, the artists prepare 450 pages of storyboards which are used to assemble an animatic. At this stage, dialogue and music are added to determine the length of each scene. In the original series (seasons 1–4), the characters' mouths were animated to match the Italian voice actors' lines; in the revived series, the mouth movements were matched to the English scripts. Episodes are worked on concurrently because each requires around two years of work to complete.

At the beginning of the first season, the production team worked from Rainbow's original headquarters in Los Angeles. During the fifth and sixth seasons, 3D CGI sequences were incorporated into the series for the first time, animated at Moving Picture Company in London, England. According to the animators, the animation of the characters' hair in underwater scenes was particularly difficult, and it was animated separately from the characters.

Casting
According to Dan Darlene, much of the voice cast were simply picked off of existing Bear Bones series; such was the case with Cheryl Chase, Jeannie Elias and Katie Leigh, all of which were previously on Bear Bones' Azumanga Daioh. In Darlene's documentary on the series, he mentioned that the major voice talent chosen in the end were chance encounters; such was the case with Melissa Disney (Bloom), Janice Kawaye (Musa), and Jennifer Hale (Flora). Leigh was to be the voice of Bloom until Disney was casted towards the end of one of the first recording sessions; Leigh would voice Tecna.

Broadcast
Winx Club first premiered through first-run syndication through the Bear Bones Lineup programming block. Reruns later aired on WAM! America's Kidz Network, a sister channel to Encore aimed at families, beginning in 1995. Between 1998 and 1999, reruns of the series aired on Cartoon Network. On September 2, 2000, Nickelodeon announced through a press release that they would be producing brand-new seasons with Bear Bones. Nickelodeon debuted four one-hour specials (also co-produced with Rainbow) summarizing the first two seasons, the first of which premiered on their flagship American channel on June 27, 2001.

By 2014, the show had been aired in over 150 countries. In 2019, after the Viacom-CBS merger announcement, Informa's Television Business International listed the show among the most important Viacom properties internationally. Third-party broadcasters that acquired the show included China's CCTV, Ireland's TG4, and France's France 3.

In June 2022, Paramount (the rebranded name of ViacomCBS) launched a 24-hour Winx Club channel on their Pluto TV on-demand service. The channel is currently only available on the Spanish and French feeds.