The artists’s highly creative take in the Tooth Fairy was inspired by the half-bird, half-human gods of ancient Buddhist and Hindu cultures. Fluttering her iridescent dragonfly wings with blurring speed, Tooth is constantly in motion, buzzing from one place to the next, her feet rarely touching the ground. “You can see half-avian/half-human characters like Tooth in Thai mythology, where they are called kinnaris.” Says Hanenbergers. “Originally, she was portrayed as a princess, but we stripped it down ti this hummingbird-like character, which is our National Geographic version of a fairy.”
Inspired by the bright plumage that adorns avians depicted in Buddhist art, the beautiful feather design on Tooth’s head lends her an ethereal but regal quality. The filmmakers had to tread carefully with her design , though, so that the blend of human and bird features would remain appealing. “We experimented with a variety of colors and shapes,” notes Hanenberger. “We couldn't make her skin too bluish or greenish and had to keep the human elements. Yellow would be too much like a canary, while blue would remind viewers of Mystique [Magneto’s accomplice in X-Men] or the Na’vi [the indigenous people of Avatar’s Pandora], and magenta was too otherworldly. More than anything else, we needed her to come across as a sincere character.”
Artist Ryan O’Loughlin’s conceptual character design was able to strike the right balance while takao Noguchi finalized Tooth’s look. In Noguchi’s later iterations, Tooth developed peacock-like tail feathers, which make her look like a princess wearing a long, glamorous gown. But the tail is also functional: Not only does it allow her to make quick turns, it also features a pattern of eye-like shapes that word off predators, just as they do in the natural world.
For a while during the design process, though, Tooth looked too much like a woman in a suit, according to head of character animation Gabe Hordos. “Once we made the decision that she would never walk around and that we would treat her like a hummingbird or dragonfly being, we hit the target.”
“Every family and very culture have their own version of the tooth fairy legend,” says head of story Hamish Grieve. “We had to make sure to make the whole process of replacing teeth with coins very clear and easy to understand so that the movie would work even if you have no idea who the tooth fairy is. We even hinted at some of the different versions of the story, by having one of the Mini Fairies fighting over a tooth with a mouse, which is a nod to the Tooth Mouse in Spanish [Ratoncito Perez pt Raton Perez] and French [La Petite Souris] cultures.”
According to Hordos, Tooth is something like a cross between an overachieving mother figure and air-traffic controller who leads a very hectic, demanding life. She is always surrounded by humming noises from the Mini Fairies, so it has a very serious impact on her when all the little ones suddenly disappear and the cavern goes quiet after Pitch steal all the teeth and the memories they old.