Children and teenagers throughout the world might not realize it, but major TV channels in 130 countries are showing, for the first time ever, a cartoon series which started out in Italy and is accompanied by comic magazines in one-third of these countries. The Winx Club cartoons and comics, produced in Italy as a response to the growing passion for all things magical and supernatural and translated into approximately thirty languages, runs counter to the usual cultura traffic which sees translation transferring entertainment - and the cultural implications embedded in it - mainly from the US to the rest of the world. As translations seem to be ideally placed to observe the effects of this reversed flow of texts for young audiences, as well as to reveal traces of an unusual source language/culture within the target English versions, this paper sets out to explore translation strategies at a macro and micro-level, form cartoons to comics. Introduced by an analysis of the hegemonic practices often hidden behind the reference to film studies, sociology and translation studies, the examples provided aim to highlight the small-scale, but nonetheless somewhat revolutionary role which cartoons and comics can play within the globalized media market. Limited as the perception of an unusual source can be through the English translations of the Winx, it can still be positively interpreted as a step towards a redefinition of what has so far been an almost unidirectional, unquestioned flow of media productions.