The sisters are overjoyed to be reunited, but there's a hitch: seems that Queen Clarion (Anjelica Huston) of the temperate fairies and Lord Milori (Timothy Dalton, who could not play the old "for my kids" card, his son being 15 at the time of the film's premiere) of the winter fairies have agreed on an ironclad rule that no fairies shall ever cross the season border for any reason. She drifts, naughtily, across the sharp line delineating the season, and her wings start to glisten with opalescent beauty, though she just about freezes to death while watching them, agog. So aye, that's the nugget of Secret of the Wings: Tinker Bell (Mae Whitman) is out nosing around the border between the autumn and winter quadrants of Pixie Hollow around the time that the rest of the fairies are busy preparing to change seasons in the human world - it's impossible to figure out a way for this to be her first winter, but that certainly would seem to be the subtext of the whole "God, Tink, here are the rules! Follow them!" routine that appears for the fourth time in four features. Marketing gimmicks don't need story logic. This presumably means that there are exactly as many winter fairies as there are all other fairies combined, which would lead to a population crisis and a great deal of wasted labor, but since the whole conceit is a transparent ploy to work the phrase "Tinker Bell's sister" into the plot synopsis, it's not worth belaboring the story logic behind it. There's also some confusing matter about what the winter fairies are the impression I get is that every time a baby laughs its first laugh, contrary to Tinker Bell and Barrie's writing, it creates two fairies, one for the winter, one for everything else. I am sure that if the only job with the Walt Disney Company that I could get was story development on the Tinker Bell pictures, I'd feel a little disgruntled about it too, but if your job is to care about doing a thing right, you damn well do it right.
And s far as "intellectually defensible" goes, they deal with the rules shift by simply ignoring that it happened. And I supposed Holmes, Gannaway et alia maybe thought that what they were doing was interesting, but I emphatically do not agree with them.
A notion which is absolutely not in the same continuity as the first film, and while this might seem nitpicky, there's no reason, ever, to be that irreverent about established series rules, unless you're going to do something interesting and intellectually defensible with it.
In particular, the film invents all sorts of outright nonsense about the winter fairies of Pixie Hollow, now stating that they live in a completely irreconcilable ecosystem, and just as they cannot cross into the temperate spring, summer, and autumn zones of the fairy realm, so can the rest of the fairies not enter the Winter Woods. But something (also potentially proving something: trained choreographer Holmes's only prior directorial credit was on the violently anodyne prequel The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning). Four writers, including director Peggy Holmes and co-director Bobs Gannaway, who had between them absolutely no prior contact with the Tinker Bell franchise, I might add, because that very much feels to me like it proves something. In the case of Secret of the Wings, that very same fantasy universe turns out to be far more mutable than we'd ever been led to believe, whereby "mutable" means that the writers decided that they could do whatever the fuck they wanted to the established rules.
Barrie's Peter Pan mythos and dropped into a wholly different kind of fantasy universe. It is, though, not very good at all, ending up almost exactly where I'd assumed beforehand that the whole Disney Fairies franchise was going to live, before Tinker Bell came along and proved that, in point of fact, DisneyToon Studios had some acutely intelligent and meaningful ideas about what they could communicate and what stories they could tell using the character so inexplicably dragged out of J.M. It's quite impossible to accuse Secret of the Wings of being the worst Tinker Bell movie, not with Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue out in the world, strutting its stuff.