| Winx Club | |
|---|---|
| Season 8 | |
 Title card for the season | |
| No. of episodes | 26 |
| Release | |
| Original network | Rai YoYo |
| Original release | 15 April – 17 September 2019 |
| Season chronology | |
The eighth season of Winx Club aired from 15 April to 17 September 2019, on the Rai YoYo preschool channel in Italy. The English version premiered on Nickelodeon Asia on 8 January 2020.[1]
The eighth season of Winx Club was heavily retooled to appeal to a preschool target audience,[2] and it is only loosely connected to the rest of the series. The creative team at Rainbow SpA (which is co-owned by Viacom) restyled the characters to appear younger, and the plot lines were simplified.[2] Most of the show's longtime crew members were not called back to work on this season, including art director Simone Borselli, who had designed the series' characters from season 1 to 7, and singer Elisa Rosselli, who had performed a majority of the songs.[3]
In another change from previous seasons, Nickelodeon's American team served as consultants rather than directly overseeing the episodes; at the time, Nickelodeon was instead working with Rainbow SpA on a new series called Club 57.[2] The American writers remained as consultants for season 8[4] and Nick's Pierluigi Gazzolo continued in his role as a director for Rainbow SpA.[5] Also during this season's production, series creator Iginio Straffi stepped away from focusing on the series. He shifted his concentration to other work with Nickelodeon, including Club 57, as well as a live-action adaptation of Winx Club aimed at an older audience.[2]
In 2019, Straffi explained his reasoning for gradually lowering the series' intended demographic:
In the last ten years, the animation audience has skewed younger. Nowadays, it's very difficult to get a 10-year-old to watch cartoons... The fans of the previous Winx Club say on social media that the new seasons are childish, but they don't know that we had to do that.[2]
- ^ "Season 8, Episode 1 logline". Nickelodeon Asia.
- ^ a b c d e "TV Kids: Iginio Straffi". Worldscreen. 22 May 2019.
- ^ Rosselli, Elisa (2019). "Elisa Rosselli Interview" (Interview).
- ^ Здесь был «Летидор»: анимационная студия Rainbow в Италии ["Letidor" was here: Rainbow animation studio in Italy]. Letidor.ru (in Russian). 10 February 2019.
- ^ "Pierluigi Gazzolo" (Press release). 20 November 2019 – via Business Wire.