“Witch” or “The Winx Club”?

In the early 2000s, there were two animated series about fairies shown on the small screen that battled to win the hearts of children: “The Winx Club”, by Iginio Straffiand “Witch”, by the Italians Elisabetta Gnone, Alessandro Barbucci It is Barbara Canepa.

Both productions had very similar plots — such as talking about young people who have powers related to elements of nature — and, therefore, ended up generating a lot of confusion among the public who used to mix the animations.

The disagreement between the drawings was so great that it even ended up in Italian court. At the time, the Disneywhich was the studio responsible for the rights to “Witch”, sued Rainbow SpA, producer of “The Winx Club”, for plagiarism, accusing the series of Straffi of having copied the plot of the animation starring Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin.

But after all, who came first?

In terms of release, “Witch” was the production that premiered first. Initially, the franchise reached the public in comic book format, being published in Italy between 2001 and 2012, and in Brazil from 2002 to 2010.

His series was only produced from 2004, after becoming a huge success among readers. In total, the animation had only two seasons, and ended in 2006. On Brazilian screens, the cartoon was shown on Rede Globo during the programs “TV Globinho” and “TV Xuxa”.

Meanwhile, “The Winx Club” has already emerged as a series, with its official debut taking place in 2004, as a collaboration between Rainbow SpA and Nickelodeon, airing until 2019 and running for eight seasons. Here, the story of Bloom, Stella, Flora, Tecna, Musa and Aisha was shown on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Discovery Kids, TV Cultura and SBT.

Therefore, if we take the release date into consideration, “Witch” actually arrived before “Winx”. However, during the trial of the case against Disney, the creator of the series about the Alfea fairies managed to prove that the pilot episode of the animation began production in 2000, a year before the release of the cartoon about Will, Irma, Taranee , Cornelia and Hay Lin.

Thus, considering this argument, in addition to considering that both plots did not have that many similarities, the Italian court decided that Disney’s accusation was not valid, giving victory to Iginio Straffi.