BEFORE: It turns out there are a lot of Winnie the Pooh films, more than I'd thought - but I'm not going to track them all down, just going to watch the most recent one and move on. Jim Cummings carries over as the voice of Pooh and Tigger.
THE PLOT: Eeyore has lost his tail, and Winnie the Pooh and his friends hold a contest to get him a new one.
AFTER: Like last night's film, this one does go back to the original Pooh stories for inspiration, in this case two stories from "Winnie the Pooh" and one from "House at Pooh Corner". They include the story about Eeyore losing his tail, and an adaptation of the Heffalump story. The problem is, Disney also adapted the Heffalump story for 2005's "Pooh's Heffalump Movie", so here they had to change the name of the non-appearing mythical beast to a Backson (mis-interpreted from a note from Christopher Robin, in which he said he'd be "back soon".)
So it's proof that they keep re-packaging the same Pooh stories, again and again. As a kid I remember seeing the introduction of the Tigger character in, like, 3 different movies. (Or maybe I saw the same movie three times by accident, who knows) No, I'm right - the 1977 film "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" incorporated elements from three previous "featurettes", including 1974's "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too". Yes, just three years after that story was told, it was told again. What a rip-off.
And last night's film used a framing device to tell its three stories in flashback. Here all three stories are muddled together, so there's no clear narrative. As a result, the search for Eeyore's tail ends up getting sidetracked by the search for Christopher Robin, and then both get put on hold when the characters have to defend against the Backson. Who's in charge here?
The reason Disney is able to get away with this is that every decade there's a whole new audience for their films, so they can just re-release and re-package the old material again and again. But what a cruel trick on parents, who have to accompany said kids to the theater. They may feel like films they saw as kids are just being repurposed for the next generation. They may also feel ripped off, if they pay full-price for a film that runs just slightly over an hour. (They really should pro-rate these things.)
I'm reminded of the character of Spider-Man, and not just because he's been re-booted several times in the last few years, both in print and in film. They redefined his super-powers in the comic book a few years ago (a storyline called "The Other"), to match the cool new movie where webbing came from his body (ick) instead of from mechanical web-shooters. So they made it look like Spider-Man died, but instead he went into a cocoon of sorts, emerging with new powers. The problem was, a similar storyline ("Changes") had played out in the comic books two years prior to that, in which Spider-Man was mutated into a giant-spider, and appeared to die, but emerged from an inner cocoon, with the new power of webbing that came from his wrists. The end result was the feeling that no one was really in charge of the storyline, and they were just telling the same stories again and again, in slightly different forms.
In addition, I thought there were too many times that the fourth wall was broken. Too many times where Pooh is revealed to be walking on a sentence of words, or able to communicate with the narrator. In one glaring bit of "Deus ex machina", the actual words from the book fall into the Backson pit, and our heroes are able to build a ladder from the words and escape from the pit. Really? You couldn't think of any other way to get them out of a hole in the ground? Maybe they could get a clue and remember that Owl possesses the power of flight?
Yes, I'm at a bit of a loss here because I'm not a kid, and I don't have a kid handy, so I have to view the film as an adult, and judge it as an adult. The best animated films are able to entertain the entire audience, however, and not just clueless children. If they really wanted to make this film appeal to adults, they would have cast more famous actors - why not Sam Elliott as Eeyore, and Steve Buscemi as Rabbit?
Also starring the voices of John Cleese (last seen in "The Great Muppet Caper"), Craig Ferguson (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon"), and Tom Kenny (last heard in "The Ant Bully").
RATING: 3 out of 10 empty honey pots
As a kid, I rather enjoyed Disney's Pooh stories. I liked the idea of the characters walking through their own books and interacting with the pages. On some level, sitting there on the living room carpet, I thought "Oh. Okay, yes, that can totally happen because this is a story, not a documentary. In a story, anything can happen."
ReplyDeleteFunny how subversive these simple things can be.