The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

Out of all the entries in this Disney review project, this may be the one I most remember seeing at an early age. That sense does little to make the proceedings more to my liking.  I also must force myself to remember that this is a work that is most emphatically aimed at small children. That too does little to help me, however old-yet-immature I may be. And with my particular—if not peculiar—preference for fidelity to the original text, I have trouble enjoying a film like this, where so many “original”contributions are made by the producers. The last point is perhaps my biggest issue with this piece: there are so many things that the filmmakers make not just different, but that they get flat out wrong—objectively I’d say, not just as a matter of opinion. Scrambling the stories from the books is one thing; the demands of movie storytelling require such changes here and there. But shifting the tone of the tales—what’s presented here is much broader and more slapstick than the gentle action of Milne’s prose—as well as changing crucial elements of those tales is for this viewer just going too far. (Even the ending of the film alters the written work’s famous ending, in a way that fundamentally changes the very idea expressed in the author's words.) At least the background visuals—based closely on Shepard’s illustrations—retain the printed work's style. (The contrast between those backgrounds and the film’s versions of the drawn characters is a bit jarring if you’re familiar with the books' look.) I would hope and pray that children of today and the future continue to take their Pooh from the printed page before they get introduced to the stories in this form; there’s no doubt in my mind they’d be better off for it. Let this film be a supplement to Milne’s magic, not the definition of these characters.