The Bratz™ girls are back in a magical new adventure as Pixies.

Bratz - Fashion Pixiez

The Bratz™ girls are back in a magical new adventure. Cloe, Jade, Sasha and Yasmin may be marketed as dolls with a passion for fashion, but the driving force of their animated stories are the bonds of friendship between them, as well as their focus on their academic studies, making them far better role models than parents might expect from just encountering them in the toy aisles.

The story opens with new characters Cymbeline and her younger sister Breeana, with Cymbeline pestering her father for her birthday present, which he reminds her she's not allowed to have until she's 18. One assumes they're discussing a car, or maybe a piercing. But when Breeana follows her sister later that night, and sees her disappear off the edge of a cliff in a twinkling of light, we find that Cymbeline's desires are far from the mundane.

Cymbeline's friends -- Cloe, Jade, Sasha and Yasmin -- also notice their friend has been out of sorts lately, sleeping in classes at Stilesville High and being generally cranky. But she's as chummy as can be with new girl Lina, who also captures girl-crazy Dylan's heart. When Cymbeline bails on their efforts to organize the charity Magnolia Ball -- an event sponsored and funded by Cymbeline's father, Mel Devlin -- they decide to confront her at her home and find out just what's wrong with her.
 

Bratz - Fashion Pixiez Buy new: $14.99 / Used from: $11.49 Usually ships in 24 hours

Meanwhile, Dylan goes off on his motorcycle, chasing a crow that has stolen his backpack. He ends up far outside the Stilesville city limits, in the woods of Whisper Hollow, where he inexplicably finds Lina. When next we see Dylan, he's under a spell to be Lina's servant. When Breeana tells the girls that Dylan -- the object of her affections -- has asked her to meet him at Whisper Hollow, Cloe and Yasmin are concerned and accompany her. What they find is a rave party of gothic dark pixies, including Lina and Cymbeline, with Dylan in their thrall. Cloe and Yasmin are discovered and caught, becoming the next victims to fall under Lina's spell.

The next day, Sasha and Jade are not happy that they've been stood up, working alone on the Magnolia Ball. And when they see Cloe and Yasmin in the company of Lina and Cymbeline, they are hurt by the new flippant and selfish attitude their friends exhibit. It's not until Sasha and Jade find the hiding Breeana that they fully understand what's going on: that Breeana and Cymbeline are from a fairy family, pixies who are sworn to care for nature and promote good works. Pixies earn their wings at 18 by performing good deeds, but Lina -- a renegade pixie who's older than she appears -- gave Cymbeline her wings early, and pulled her into her thrall, all to weaken Cymbeline's father, who is the King of the Pixies. Lina already made Breeana and Cymbeline's mother disappear ten years ago, and with every member of the Devlin family she takes down, she weakens the Pixie King further.

Now Sasha, Jade and Breeana have to use the power of friendship and love to save their friends and help the Devlin family. It's a magical action adventure leading up to a pixie invasion of Stilesville. Lina may have the Pixie King on the ropes, but the ensuing Bratz™ Attackz were something she didn't plan on.

Of course things end happily ever after, with more music and dancing. The girls still have their trademarked "passion for fashion", but it's underplayed here. Even when one of the girls compliments another on her footwear, the thanks are accompanied with the disclaimer that the boots were on sale, quashing any thoughts of expensive materialism.

The background animation is nicely done, but the work on the characters often appears more like a session of The Sims than a CGI film. The girls all look like the Bratz™ dolls rather than real characters, in the vein of the similarly-styled Barbie™ CGI toons. But if your kids are into the dolls themselves, they will probably find the characters more recognizable this way.

The singers who perform the tunes (written by Matthew Gerrard and Robbie Nevil) throughout the movie are uncredited -- which is a shame, since the music drives much of the story, and come into play twice in the bonus features, with a Bratz™ Karaoke Sing-Along of "Look Closer", a one minute segment from the film where Sasha and Jade are given magical pixie glasses so they can see the invisible world around them. There's also a three minute animated music video of "One of a Kind".

Additional bonus features include the "Pixie Vision Memory Game", where viewers get to see a scene through pixie glasses, then have to remember where the pixies were when seeing the scene again without the magical viewers. The "Fashion Stylin' Game" is misnamed, as it isn't a game at all, but an activity: the viewer can pick one of three pairs of shoes, three outfits, and three pairs of pixie wings to put on Sasha. This is easily the most disappointing of the features, as there's hardly any room for imagination -- all the outfits are exactly the same, varied by color alone.
 

Other Bratz Releases:
Bratz - Glitz 'N' Glamour
Bratz: Passion 4 Fashion Diamondz
Livin' It Up! With the Bratz
Bratz: Genie Magic
Bratz - Rock Angelz
Bratz: Babyz - The Movie
Bratz - Starrin' & Stylin'
Bratz: Rock Angelz (UMD for PSP)