Movie: Winnie the Pooh (2011)

[mmcirvin]

The new Winnie the Pooh feature is utterly charming and very funny, almost surprisingly so. It's also very short, even with the unrelated short subject at the beginning; it was the first movie I've seen in years to leave me wanting more. Admittedly, that was probably a good decision given the probable age of the target audience. Jorie loved the movie but was ready to bolt when the closing credits rolled.

It's an adaptation of several additional chapters from Milne's Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, but the adaptation is as loose and rambling as those in the Sixties/Seventies Disney shorts (as it happens, Jorie and I recently read some of the source material), and Milne purists who hate those won't like this one any better. But it shows no sign of the manifold forms of damage Disney's done to the Pooh franchise in various media since then; the style is as close to the old shorts as they could get, including the metafictional "storybook" and narrator gags.

It's done mostly in hand-drawn traditional animation, or a digital approximation of same, with a few obviously CGI additions like the swarms of bees. One visual difference that took a little getting used to is that the old shorts were very much from the scratchy-line era of Disney animation (which I think was a response to the technical limitations of early xerography), and the new animation has a much cleaner line, more like what Disney was doing in the Forties and Fifties. Tigger's animation team seemed to be trying to scratch up the lines a little, but Pooh looks more cleanly geometric than he used to.

While the theater wasn't packed (Disney's marketing for this has been very low-key, downright subdued compared to Cars 2), the audience seemed to contain a surprising number of adults and older kids. I hope more people take their little kids to see this, because they'll like it and it's much less obnoxious than much of what's out there for them.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

NB: the shorts I'm talking about are "Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree", "Winnie-the-Pooh and the Blustery Day", and "Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger Too"; if you've seen the feature The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, that's a fix-up of the three shorts with an additional coda, and it's actually significantly longer than the new feature.

There was a fourth short adapted from the books, "Winnie-the-Pooh and a Day for Eeyore", made in the 1980s; it's included as an extra on the Many Adventures DVD, and is based on the chapters about Pooh Sticks and Eeyore's birthday. It's an interesting oddity in that it's probably the most faithful adaptation of the source material they ever did; unfortunately, the animation and direction are relatively poor.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

...and Milne purists who hate those

Yo.

won't like this one any better.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've made my peace with the Disneyisms in the movies; it's an alternate Pooh that retains enough of the original to be appealing. But that's partly because the Disney Pooh was really the first one I was exposed to in childhood.

I've also seen some of the Soviet Vinni Pukh shorts; they're very, very good, and in some ways closer to the source, the big modification being that they removed Christopher Robin and gave Piglet most of his lines. But the Soviet Pooh is as different a take on the character from Disney's as one could imagine, while still, I think, being supported by the text.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Now, the original stories in Disney-produced Winnie-the-Pooh TV cartoons, tie-in storybooks, etc. are another story; they're usually wretched.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, in Russia Owl is female.

The way the third short weaves together the stories about Eeyore's birthday and Eeyore's missing tail is pretty clever.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

You should have asked the adults if they were Craig Ferguson fans. He's been talking about the movie quite a bit (he does the voice of Owl.) A couple nights ago, he had the actor who does Pooh/Tigger as a guest.

It's kind of amusing, considering his show is way past prime time and full of cussing, although most of the cussing is bleeped.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Some may have been attracted by John Cleese's narration; his performance is essentially in the tradition of Sebastian Cabot's.

There are a couple of songs sung by Zooey Deschanel, to continue in the vein of Zooey Deschanel-related research. I personally don't think she's that great a singer, but they're pleasant enough.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she was a guest on his Friday show, for more Pooh-promotion. And I agree about her singing.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

According to reviews, there are several credit cookies, which we missed. Jorie's in a phase in which she doesn't like to see the endings of things; she quickly turns off TV shows when it's clear they're about to be over.