Winnie the Pooh [Review by Haus]

Winnie the Pooh is short, sweet, and different. (This review, alas, will be but one of these things — maybe none.)

First, Pooh is short. Truly short. It’s listed at 69 minutes on IMDb, and this is very generous — I clocked it at under an hour, excluding the credits and the Loch Ness-themed animated short that precedes the feature. (I didn’t get much out of this — no worry coming in a bit late.)

Second, it’s sweet. Sweet like honey. Sweet like a biscuit. It’s true to the spirit of A.A. Milne’s books (if not to their hyphens), and the story is drawn and adapted from these. (If your memory of the Pooh stories is hazy, as mine is, you’ll likely find some aspects very familiar and assume the story is lifted straight from the books. It’s not.) The plot is cute and simple, filled of course with the bumbling antics of the Bear of Little Brain, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga and Roo. Christopher Robin breezes through a little. “Honey” is regularly misspelled. If you’re concerned about the wanton trampling of vague childhood memories, you can rest easy — this Pooh does not offend.

The voice acting was fine, though I did find Piglet a little grating, and I daresay Pooh at times sounded (just a little) like a certain well-known Conservative.

Lastly, it’s different. Whereas Cars 2 and its kin wow us with hyper-gloss 3D CGI, Pooh is stubbornly old fashioned. Although it’s hard to imagine anything coming out of Disney these days without ricocheting through a few gigs of VRAM — and no doubt, some digital wizardry underlies this latest creation as well — it’s well disguised here. Pooh feels decidedly homey. This is a good thing: Pooh and his clan are deliberately rough-sketched and chunky in their movements, and no less endearing for it. The whites of Pooh’s eyes aren’t even white. Take that, Lightning McQueen.

The film employs the trusty “story told from a book” trope, complete with on-screen book and occasional page turning — but it also plays with this, frequently hurling its animated protagonists headlong into letters, words, and sentences, which in turn crash down and figure, sometimes, in the story. (This is the only one of the Disney Pooh series I’ve seen — or at least that I remember — so I don’t know if it’s the first to do this. I’m calling it “different,” anyway.)  The film’s trim runtime feels just long enough, and frankly I wish more films would toy with the status quo in this way.

It’s also different in that it didn’t really feel like a movie. Nowadays theaters sell tickets to high-def rebroadcasts of Met operas; you can rent out the theater for corporate gatherings, birthday parties, and the like. Theaters are big into repurposing, and this felt like just such a thing: a brief, wholly pleasant, and wholly unusual hour of buoyant, lighthearted fun more like reading an old Pooh story than watching a feature film.

If you’re on the fence, don’t be. The people-watching in G-rated features is often first-rate, and Pooh didn’t disappoint. Go ahead, spin that wheel, see what you get. Full bonus awarded if your own showing offers a squadron of Facebook-for-HTC-addicted Juicy Couture-trimmed tanning queens and a stroller-bound shrieking infant with a popped collar and a Yankees bling necklace. As did ours.

It was really worth seeing. (As was the film.)

HAUS VERDICT: A light lunch of whimsy. C’mon, go. It’s only an hour, and you really oughtn’t regret it. 

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.