Winnie The Pooh Review

Let’s get this straight: I straight up love Winnie the Pooh, as any right-thinking person should. As a child, I would have the stories read to me until I could read them myself. My mother and I would watch The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh on video and the Stephen Fry and Judi Dench voiced audio books would play on our car’s cassette player on long journeys. My love of Pooh has not lessened as I have grown older; moreover, a deeper appreciation of the subtleties of the writing with all its wit and wordplay has developed, as well as recognition of the book’s greater depths, particularly of the pathos of Pooh and Christopher Robin’s final outing.

So the arrival of a new Pooh film brings with it mixed emotions. On the one hand, there’s a wariness of anything that might besmirch Pooh’s good name – with which Disney have had mixed results – but on the other, anything that can evoke even a little of the charm of the original stories and introduce new people to Pooh bear can only be a good thing, surely.

Winnie the Pooh takes place in the familiar Hundred Acre Wood and follows Pooh and his friends as they attempt to find a new tail for Eeyore, hunt down a fearsome ‘backson’ and find some honey for Pooh to eat. The film is preceded by a fun short about the Loch Ness Monster entitledThe Ballad of Nessie. Both the short and the main feature are traditionally animated and Pooh’s adventures are narrated by John Cleese. As in the previous 1977 feature film, Pooh and friends enjoy their adventures in and amongst the words and paragraphs of the book Cleese is reading from.

As much as I wanted to like Winnie the Pooh, I found it difficult to truly get on board with new film. The adventures are all loosely based on pre-established stories in the books, so it’s not the material so much as the execution that was problematic for me. It’s all a little too knowing, slightly superficial and lacks something of the allure the franchise held for me as a youth. One might suggest that perhaps I’ve simply grown out of the characters, but a great deal of Pooh’s longevity is down to the franchise appealing to people of all ages. I had also forgotten how Americanised the characters were under Disney, which, though I hate to admit it, was something of a problem for me – especially as Christopher Robin remains English; why would he be hanging out with a load of American animals?

Despite this, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to raise a smile at some points. There is a high level of love and attention put into the characters and the music (which, surprisingly, features Zooey Deschanel singing, quite pleasantly, on a number of songs). A dream sequence in which Pooh imagines a world of honey proves to be the film’s highlight. And, perhaps most importantly, the children in attendance at the screening seemed to enjoy the film no end. Hopefully, Winnie the Pooh will find its audience somewhere among the 3D, CGI kids flicks that swamp the multiplexes – but I’d be very surprised if this film enjoys the kind of timeless adoration enjoyed by other Pooh films and books.