The Russian Winnie-the-Pooh

[mmcirvin]

As mentioned in comments to the last post: The Soyuzmultfilm Winnie-the-Pooh shorts, with English subtitles. There's an extended book quote there from director Fyodor Khitruk explaining why there's no Christopher Robin, among other things.

These are wonderful little pieces; Jorie pronounces Russian Pooh funnier than Disney Pooh (though some of that may just be the novelty that he's speaking in a language unintelligible to her). I like the comic timing here, the use of beats and awkward pauses between Pooh's bursts of rapid-fire chatter and verse.

It's remarkable that he seems to be such a different character from the one Anglophones know, yet most of his lines and behavior are actually straight out of A. A. Milne. The Russian films emphasize his boorishness and surreal creativity over the dreamy, scatterbrained quality that's emphasized in the Disney version, but it was all there to begin with.

Comments

Vinni ze Pooh

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Cool, I hadn't seen those before!

I feel fortunate that my first exposure to "Winnie the Pooh" was the original books as opposed to some film/tv adaptation.

I'm not sure I remember details well enough to judge, but my first impression is that the Disney version characters are visually closer to the original illustrations, but the characters personalities are truer to the original in the Russian version.

Re: Vinni ze Pooh

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. The Disney characters are actually modeled after the simplified and colorized versions of the Shepard illustrations used by Stephen Slesinger on US licensed merchandise in the first half of the 20th century. Slesinger was the one who established that Pooh was yellow and always wore a red shirt (in the Shepard pics, he only bothered to wear a shirt on occasion, color unknown).

When I read the Milne stories to Jorie I do voices for the characters, and for Pooh I started out with a rough Sterling Holloway impression, but have been drifting toward a sort of perpetually befuddled, occasionally imperious delivery sort of like what my mother used to use. But lately I've been throwing in Yevgeny Leonov's machine-gun "taram-pam-pam, taram-pam-pam-pam-pam" now and then just to make Jorie laugh.

Re: Vinni ze Pooh

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

sort of like what my mother used to use

For Winnie-the-Pooh, that is.

Re: Vinni ze Pooh

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, the post-Soviet history of Soyuzmultfilm is kind of sad and contains startling WTF moments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuzmultfilm#Soyuzmultfilm.27s_decline).