Winx Club

Winx Club is an animated series produced by Rainbow, with later seasons co-produced by Nickelodeon. It was created and directed by Italian animator Iginio Straffi. It premiered on 28 January 2004, becoming a ratings success in Italy and on Nickelodeon networks internationally. The series is set in a magical universe inhabited by fairies, witches, and other mythical creatures, and tells the story of Bloom, a teenage girl from planet Earth who discovers she is a fairy. Enrolling at Alfea College, she befriends four other fairies and forms a group called the Winx Club, fighting a long series of enemies threatening the Magic Dimension, and in the process, discovering her true origins and the fate of her biological family.

Straffi's original storyline for Winx lasted three seasons, but he chose to continue with a fourth season in 2009. Around this time, Winx Club's popularity attracted the attention of American media company Viacom, who acquired 30% of Rainbow S.p.A. in 2011. Starting in 2010, Rainbow began producing new seasons of Winx Club with Nickelodeon Animation Studio; episodes were jointly written by the Italian and American teams, with Nickelodeon aiming to make the series multicultural and appealing to viewers from different countries. To attract American audiences, Viacom assembled a voice cast that included notable Nickelodeon actors (such as Elizabeth Gillies and Ariana Grande), invested US$100 million in advertising for the series, and inducted Winx Club into the Nicktoons franchise. The continued partnership between Rainbow and Nickelodeon on Winx Club led to the development of more co-productions, including Club 57 in 2019, on which much of Winx Club's staff worked.

The series faced budget cuts during production of its seventh season, resulting in the removal of the Hollywood voice cast and 3D-animated segments. After the seventh season premiered worldwide in 2015, Winx entered a four-year hiatus until the eighth season premiered in 2019. At Straffi's decision, the new season was heavily retooled for a preschool target audience.

A live-action young adult adaptation of Winx Club, Fate: The Winx Saga, premiered on Netflix in 2021 and lasted two seasons. In January 2023, Viacom (now known as Paramount) sold its stake in Rainbow back to Straffi, allowing him full control of the studio's new projects. This included an animated reboot of Winx Club, Winx Club: The Magic Is Back, which premiered in 2025.

The series follows the adventures of a group of six girls known as the Winx, students at the Alfea College for Fairies. The team is made up of Bloom, the Fairy of the Dragon Flame; Stella, the Fairy of the Sun and moon (later Fairy of the Shining Sun); Musa, the Fairy of Music; Tecna, the Fairy of Technology; and Flora, the Fairy of Nature. In the second season Aisha, the Fairy of Waves, became the sixth member of the group. The main male characters are the Specialists, a group of students at the Red Fountain school who are also the Winx fairies' boyfriends. They include Bloom's boyfriend Sky; Stella's boyfriend 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 to fight using laser weapons. In the third season, the wizard Nabu, Aisha's boyfriend, is added to the group of boys. 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 with 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.

During the 1990s, comic artist Iginio Straffi noticed that most action cartoons were focused on male heroes; at that time, he felt that the "cartoon world was devoid of female characters". Straffi hoped to introduce an alternative show with a female lead aged 16 to 18, as he wanted to "explore the psychological side" of the transition to adulthood. He decided to develop a pilot centred on the conflict between two rival colleges; one for fairies and another for witches. Straffi compared his original premise to "a sort of 'Oxford–Cambridge rivalry' in a magical dimension". In expanding the concept, Iginio Straffi drew his inspiration from Japanese manga and the comics of Sergio Bonelli.

Straffi's pilot, which was titled "Magic Bloom", featured the original five Winx members in attires like those of traditional European fairies. It was produced during a twelve-month development period that included animation tests, character studies, and market surveys. The animation attracted the interest of Rai Fiction, which paid for 25% of the production cost in exchange for Italian broadcast rights and a share of the series' revenue over 15 years. After holding test screenings of the pilot, however, Straffi was unhappy with the audience's unenthusiastic reaction to the characters' outdated clothing style and stated that the pilot did not satisfy him. In a 2016 interview, Straffi said the result "looked like just another Japanese-style cartoon ... but nothing like [the modern] Winx ". He likened his feelings about the pilot to an "existential crisis" and chose to scrap the entire test animation despite an investment of over €100,000 in the completed pilot.