Movie Info
Movie Name: Winnie the Pooh
Studio: Walt Disney Animation Studio
Genre(s): Animated/Musical/Family
Release Date(s): April 15, 2011 (UK)/July 15, 2011 (US)
MPAA Rating: G
Pooh…teaching us greed and gluttony are good.
Pooh has one thing on his mind…honey. When his supply runs low, Pooh sets out for more. Eeyore loses his tail, and Pooh learns that the prize for finding it is a honey pot. Now he must find the tail, but the situation is complicated when his best friend Christopher Robin appears to be taken by a Backson. Pooh, Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, and Piglet must rescue Robin from the Backson and the pot of honey might have to wait.
Directed by Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall, Winnie the Pooh is the fifty-first film in the Walt Disney Animated Classic series and a bit of a sequel to the 1977 film The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh. Following in Tangled in 2010, Winnie the Pooh adapts aspects of A. A. Milne stories from Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, plus Disney’s own straight to video Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin (1997).
The Backsons are coming!
Winnie the Pooh is always a bit hard to watch for me. I love the cleverness of the books and how Milne had the characters represent different parts of a person’s persona (a very interesting take on childhood). Disney dumbs this down of course, but still manages to capture a lot of the essence. I also think that the original illustrations for Winnie-the-Pooh were far superior to Disney’s version. I love the simplicity and warmth of the original art.
Even compared to the original Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the art for Winnie the Pooh has changed. The basic character designs have remained the same, but I find this movie more lifeless than the last. The characters are too clean, too smooth, and too exact to have any warmth. I think the character design (and voice acting) for Christopher Robin is really distracting and fortunately isn’t a huge part of the story.
Oh Christopher…did you know stuffed animals really want to steal the souls of their owners?
The next problem with Winnie the Pooh is that despite being a solid Pooh story, the movie seems small in scope. A TV series called The New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh that aired from 1988 to 1991 also dumbed down this movie. The stories in the TV series were very similar to the story in the movie so it just feels a bit like more of the same. It isn’t bad, but I can’t get into it as a feature film.
Winnie the Pooh will be enjoyed by most, but I find it a little tired. I still love the clever use of the actual story and narrator as another character in the film, but countless Winnie-the-Pooh stories have worn on me and make this movie feel like more of the same. Disney followed Winnie the Pooh with in Wreck-It Ralph in 2012.
Related Links:
The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh (1977)
