A Tooth Fairy Tale

If you felt shortchanged by the movie industry’s lack of stories about the Tooth Fairy, you’d be justified in your feelings. 

The limited offerings that have been left under our pillows have been ones like Dwayne Johnson playing a hockey player (Tooth Fairy) and an ensemble animated film where he has to share the limelight with a Santa, the Easter Bunny, and Jack Frost (Rise of the Guardians - which is actually pretty decent).

A Tooth Fairy Tale brings us a straight-up story about tooth fairies, albeit they inhabit a world that also has trolls, goblins, and talking spiders (the latter has one voiced by the legendary Jon Lovitz).

Booboo Steward voices Van, a rebellious and misguided tooth fairy who spends more time on his homemade skateboard than he does flying to collect teeth children leave under their pillows for him. 

On one such mission, Van encounters a goblin called Gemma (Larkin Bell), who is causing a stir, not only for taking the tooth herself (typically, goblins provide the gold coins) but also for being out in the daylight, which goblins can’t do!

Upon further investigation, Van learns more about the secret world of the goblins and slowly starts to fall for Gemma. This tooth fairy tale of romance, however, could put the fragile codependency between the two sides at risk, especially once those pesky spiders get involved.

If this is sounding messy, it’s because it is. Whereas Rise of the Guardians had an unorthodox yet coherent plot, A Tooth Fairy Tale lacks the robust allure of seeing those storybook legends interact, instead offering up vaguely developed characters and lore being stretched as thin as, yes, I’m going to do it, spider silk.

The music choices are excellent in the animated film, bringing a much-needed pulse of energy to the piece, as is the chemistry between the two main characters. Van and Gemma are great on screen together, even if their reasons for being presented to us don’t make total sense.

Some of the animation seems a little too shaky, as are some of the voice recordings, which don’t always come across with the clarity we now expect from this genre.

It seems we must continue to wait for a really good film about the Tooth Fairy as a character, so, in the meantime, keep flossing. Otherwise, you don’t know what the movie studios will churn out and put under your pillow next!

A Tooth Fairy Tale will be in Scottish Cinemas from 10th October and across the rest of the UK from 24th October 2025.