WINNIE THE POOH
2011
Directed by Stephen Anderson and Don Hall
Written by a bunch
Only eight months earlier, Disney had released Tangled, their 50th "canonical" animated feature, a film understood to be of sufficient importance to its animation studio that its numbered "canon" only exists because of it, and which we can, from our vantage point here in the future, deem of inestimable importance to Disney animation in the 21st century as a collection of techniques and technologies, even if we can't quite accord it quite as much importance to a studio that was about to release Frozen and, to the extent that Disney's two princess musical hits of the early 2010s represented a fork in the road that offered two distinctive paths, chose the wrong one. But that's for later, and in July 2011, WDAS had already released their 51st feature, Winnie the Pooh—for that is what they called the film, deciding upon this titling efficiency in the moment of its release, in exchange for being slightly confusing for all time to come—which also has some importance attached to it, none of it good, all of it the opposite of monumental. To the extent it has a legacy, it's of the kind known only to animation aficionados, though every animation aficionado knows that legacy: Winnie the Pooh is the very last film, and I could say "to date," but God knows why I would even bother, to be produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios under the traditional or at least "traditional" regime of hand-drawn animation. Meanwhile, outside of that niche, I think there's a better-than-even chance that a non-animation aficionado would not readily understand that it was produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, or what that means in this context; to some extent, that uninitiated normie even has the clearer view of things.
In any case, in the years prior, Disney had made a major if ultimately short-lived effort to revive the art of hand-drawn animation: when John Lasseter was awarded creative control over WDAS in 2006, one of that pixel-monger's first goals was to reverse the decision that Disney's previous regime had imposed upon its animation studio to abandon hand-drawn animation in favor of the accurately-predicted all-CGI future; and, although it was an awkward undertaking in some respects (the abandonment of digital ink-and-paint animation at Disney had been accomplished so thoroughly that they no longer even had the in-house technological infrastructure to support it), WDAS reassembled as many talents from its 1990s Renaissance as possible, and in 2009 they gave the world The Princess and the Frog, a wonderful film that, for all its enchantment, did not successfully roll back the clock, making $271 million in theaters on a $105 million budget and therefore doing only a bit better than breaking even. Now, Winnie the Pooh does predate Princess and the Frog's underperformance; Lasseter himself originated the project in 2008, enlisting Stephen Anderson and Don Hall (who ultimately directed) to develop it. But it seems worthwhile to keep Princess and the Frog in mind, because with it, I think Winnie the Pooh becomes more explicable than it would be otherwise: basically just a modest gamble of an avowed children's cartoon to be made on a small budget—only $30 million this time—keeping WDAS's "traditional" animation on life support just a little bit longer, keeping open the possibility that, maybe, they could hit it big and, afterwards, make some real animated films again; in these and in a few other things, in fact, it wasn't all that dissimilar to the gamble that Walt made with Dumbo, though there are some pretty notable distinctions. One of those being that it didn't work: Winnie the Pooh made $50 million, so not even barely profitable, and two films in, the revival was over.
But, after all, Dumbo competed in a market where it was either that or literally nothing, and where it was still but the fifth feature-length cel-animated cartoon ever made, and now it's 2011 and, to quote your parents, we have Winnie the Pooh at home. It's even sort of pitiable, and while I'll mention here I even adore this cute little thing, pity might have inflected its reputation more than is really warranted in the years since, so it falls on me to point out what the last hand-drawn Disney film actually is, a follow-up to 1977's package collection of shorts, of course, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh—hence why I feel justified in finding its title annoying—that is but one amongst many such things, and accordingly only a slightly-enlarged, theatrically-released addition to all the other follow-ups to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the veritable constellation of Winnie the Pooh television and direct-to-video media that Disney had been hawking to parents of small kids now for three decades straight. And it is arguably not enlarged. For one thing, Winnie the Pooh cannot be enlarged, or it wouldn't be Winnie the Pooh anymore, and we may consider one of those 1990s Renaissance talents that Disney brought back for The Princess and the Frog and for Winnie the Pooh as an illustrative example of what that means: Winnie the Pooh was the last time that Rasoul Azadani earned the credit of "layout supervisor," and tell me, does Winnie the Pooh even potentially seem like a project that would benefit, specifically, from the medium-redefining dynamism of the layout supervisor of epic-scaled works like Aladdin, Pocahontas, Hercules, even, however much we want to treat it like a goofball comedy, The Emperor's New Groove? Not that there's anything wrong with its layout! But it wouldn't be right for a film, by definition stuffed with fluff, to have too much more muscle put into it than what Disney Japan was already doing with the cheaper DTV films.
But I also mean "scarcely enlarged" in wholly objective terms: it surely cost more than any Pooh movie to date, which itself is probably as much a matter of labor arbitrage on the DTV films, with this one made by once-superstar animators in California, even if I'd also imagine it had more "prestige" thrown at it, in terms of letting its creators cook more at their own pace; and it does enjoy higher production values to the extent that this matters (because, in some respects, its impact is negative). Not that I've seen anywhere close to all of them (there's also some indication the ones I have seen are atypically not-bad), but I'd likely judge it the best Winnie the Pooh, after The Many Adventures, but that hedging language says something, and I think a perfectly reasonable person could find 1997's Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search For Christopher Robin better, whilst 2003's Piglet's Big Movie could be the favorite of one only slightly less-reasonable. (If your favorite is 2018's Christopher Robin, get out.) But I've held back on the really dispositive statistic: this film, the seal of the Disney hand-drawn features, if we deign to call to call it a feature, is all of 63 minutes long (cf. 74 minutes with The Many Adventures, even 64 with freaking Dumbo, and even 76 and 75 for the above-named Winnie the Pooh DTV films!), and it's a figure that is rendered severely inaccurate by including over nine minutes of credits (which, sure, do have a few animated drawings in them, wow), leaving us with about 53.5 minutes of actual content. The previous "last" Disney hand-drawn animated feature, Home On the Range—the last at the time, the last to be made without outsourcing the basic technology, the last in the line begun with Snow White—is not accorded a great deal of respect, probably partly because the entrenched nostalgia for traditional animation hadn't set in yet in 2004, and partly because it plainly wasn't asking for any; but it was still an actual movie, that would satisfy the average moviegoer's definition thereof. This is coming from a person who desperately wishes that 80-90 minute features (those modern credits, after all) could come back, and that short-or-shorter subjects had a viable niche at all, but it sure doesn't seem like Lasseter or his bosses, by the time Winnie the Pooh was released in 2011, especially cared whether it even conjured the possibility of rejuvenating traditional animation at Disney anymore. They slapped a fig-leaf of short on the front of it, "The Ballad of Nessie," this being a just-so story of how Loch Ness was created, with one memorably groanworthy in-joke (a geographical location identified as "Glen Keane") and little else besides a cute art style that applies a plaid pattern to its Scottish highland backdrops; this was six minutes, and otherwise bad, and discounting its credits, you didn't get an hour of entertainment (or child-quieting) out of the ticket you bought. What an astonishing surprise it commercially floundered.
This is... a lot of bitching for a movie I say I enjoy, I realize. But it has the place in history it has—as a limp twitch of a dead art form—and that inevitably colors one's perceptions of it. Nevertheless, it still lives on our screens,* and it would be unhealthy to continue grieving what it helped us lose all those years ago. And so let us return to the childhood bedroom of Christopher Robin (Jack Boulter), rendered in live-action,** where a mild-mannered narrator (an unrecognizable John Cleese, which is preferable for these purposes, but then why John Cleese?) sets the scene in a way that calibrates the film we're about to watch: "it could be any little boy's bedroom," I believe is the line, which is aggressively false in 2011 and not, I think, intended to be taken as true, but establishes that the film's horizons are going to be parochially small, which seems correct for a Winnie the Pooh. But of course our interests don't lie in his bedroom, which is only the stage for Christopher Robin's imagination—15% of the movie is end credits, I've complained, but they are charming end credits, running through the story we've just seen as it "actually" always was, a collection of toys in still poses reflecting the various plot beats, but who only live inside Christopher Robin's mind—and into Christopher Robin's dad's book we go with Zooey Deschanel singing the "Winnie the Pooh" theme, and it's be okay if you, like me, don't like Deschanel's interpretation of the song, because it isn't getting it altogether wrong, and being soothing is the important part.
Even so, multiple crises are presently developing in the Hundred Acre Wood: Pooh (Jim Cummings) is out of honey; Eeyore (Bud Luckey) has lost his tail; and while Christopher Robin is present to establish a contest to devise a replacement for Eeyore's tail with a honey pot as a prize, nobody including Pooh manages to win it because their ideas all run afoul of an unexpected defect that subjects Eeyore to further humiliation, and soon thereafter Christopher Robin disappears, with only a note left behind that the gang interprets as a desperately-scrawled plea to rescue Christopher Robin from the "Back Soon," or as Owl (Craig Ferguson) pronounces it, the "Backson," a monster Owl would assure you he did not just invent out of whole cloth in order to sound smart.
It may be revealing of the fundamental limitations of Pooh as a conceptual playground that of the three post-Many Adventures movies I've named, they all have basically the same plot ("a character is missing, let's find him") and even in several particulars of its plot ("the seemingly-bookish nerd, who is actually nearly-illiterate, creates an unnecessary quest"), this one is recapitulating, obviously enough, The Search For Christopher Robin; though I'm also not sure the limitations are something that needed to be "revealed" to anybody, and, given how very much these films are about vibe and texture, cozy familiarity isn't exactly a sin and the pleasure is in the details, which are distinctive enough. Yet I do think there's a cleverness to how it structures its little plot: it doesn't want to be an anthology film, like The Many Adventures had no choice but to be, but has the same shaggy feel, with the gang hypothetically devoting themselves to, uh, their search for Christopher Robin, and the capture of the Backson, but developing that out of one subplot (the master of all Pooh plots, man vs. nature in its purest form, "Pooh is hungry"), and then allowing that subplot to continue as something almost like a bildungsroman for poor Pooh, while also allowing Eeyore's plot and Tigger's (also Jim Cummings's) plot to spin off their own intertwining threads from that (Tigger domineeringly deciding to put a spring in Eeyore's butt and turn him into Tigger's self-aggrandizing cyborg creation, Tigger Two), which tie so elegantly back into the main plot, that I think you'd predict long before it occurs that somehow Tigger is going to get stuff stuck on his head and everybody is going to think he's the Backson.***
And amidst all these doings, there's the gentleness of storytelling and low-keyness of the stakes that marks it as a Winnie the Pooh film, though it may be on the former count that it departs the most thoroughly from its franchise. It is not that it is not very deliberately, and mostly successfully, a throwback to The Many Adventures and its old-fashioned children's narrative styles, because it is; I'm not sure there's more than two or three jokes in the entire movie that feel "21st century," and one of them is just the way that after someone says something at odds with reality, as the denizens of the Hundred Acre Woods often do, Christopher Robin does that Gen X/Millennial slow "...okay," which is, for the record, more jarring than it probably seems merely written out, but you can also see how that slipped through the cracks and be all the more amazed that so little else did. But of the various pieces of Pooh media I've seen, it is by far the one most invested in its characters as not merely the manifestations of magnified childhood foibles, but genuinely utterly stupid, so if it is still "about" childhood foibles, Winnie the Pooh despises childhood foibles, and it's willing to get pretty mean-spirited about it. Calvin and Hobbesishly so in some cases:
This shows up in ways that are maybe debatable, like Pooh having an entire "dream ballet" kind of musical number where he vanishes into worrisome hallucinations about honey (it is called "Everything Is Honey" and lives up to its name), and in ways that are less debatable but have a cartoon gloss to them so maybe they don't seem as mean, like when they dig a hole to trap the Backson, which they all inevitably fall into themselves, including Owl, and the movie drives you half-crazy making you wait for that punchline, but then it's a more contemptuous version of that punchline than you even thought it would be. And then there's ways where it's pretty unmistakable, like Piglet, who gets out the hole, and shows back up with five neatly-severed, obviously-too-short segments of the rope they had with them, because there are five of them to rescue. And also these segments are not secured to anything. It is, I suppose, more a matter of tenor—obviously, they've always been dumb—but I think that difference in tenor is readily-perceived, The Many Adventures having been the product of talents reaching back to the Golden Age who to some degree defined themselves against the absolute cartoon maroons that Warners and MGM were showcasing, while Winnie the Pooh is the product of talents who in many cases don't even predate The Simpsons. (You know, given how totally unstressed it is, I can't tell if it's a deliberate joke that Owl, so savagely illiterate he cannot read the words "back soon," is also writing his memoirs; but even if it was an accident, I still think it's hilarious.) And here's the rub: the reason that Winnie the Pooh is "probably the best" since The Many Adventures is, in fact, largely bound up with it being probably the funniest, probably by an awful lot, and its cruel renditions of its childlike characters, artfully channeled through what still feels like the restraint of Poohvian humor, is precisely how it gets there. So it's not even really a criticism—even if it sort of unsettles me about it.
I may not be much more settled about the 21st century manufacture of it. Pooh movies have never truly benefited from the abandonment of xerography for digital ink-and-paint, and if that had already happened by 1997, it still means that one of the kinds of texture that is important to it—the literal texture of its characters' lines—exists only in how much the animators and their clean-up artists would be willing to draw back on their well-honed slick Renaissance style, and it's not very much, so it's basically down to which characters already have some texture built into them, which for reasons that I suppose comes naturally mainly comprises the ones who are (though I still don't understand why this is so) real animals, Eric Goldberg's Rabbit (Tom Kenny) and Dale Baer's Owl. (Some is leftover for Andreas Deja's Tigger, who continues to utilize the scrawled-in—or a simulacrum of scrawled-in, it's still very stable—lines for his stripe pattern, under dark gray digital paint, that had become part of the revised character design years earlier.) Not including Tigger, these are also the characters who are the most "off" and have the most quarrelsome elements to their animation, Baer supposing an element of hyperactivity in Owl that leaves him a little bit overarticulated, but I don't think terribly distractingly, and Rabbit just not being very recognizable as Rabbit beyond the character model. Between Kenny's very-different vocal performance and the complete lack of story elements that engage Rabbit's specific personality (I think they thought they got "Rabbit's personality" by having him be the most exasperated, but there's more to it than that), that's already a little baked-in even before you get to Goldberg, who, of the Renaissance animators, was always the most dissonant in style (hence why his greatest achievement is Genie, a film-long intentional dissonance), and with that what you get is a nicely-drawn, even visually-complex figure, who is also a legitimately effective figure of cartoon comedy by reacting to the stupidity of his fellows while being equally stupid, but always a rather impersonal and generic one. None of this is outright bad: I'd probably still persist in finding Rabbit my favorite here! (because Goldberg is working that generic cartoon for all the laughs it's worth). And Marc Henn's Pooh, Deja's Tigger, Randy Haycock's Eeyore, and Bruce W. Smith's Kanga and Roo (voiced by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Wyatt Dean Hall, respectively) are all wonderfully well-animated, perhaps altogether too sleek in the way that, in this very-particular-context, runs afoul of the sterility that I've always said that digital ink-and-paint threatens; but there's nothing wrong with them. Though let's also say that Henn's Christopher Robin is outright bad, so I'm glad he's not in the movie that much, because I abhor the redesign that's given him those big Goddamn Disney googly eyes.
Of course, half the pleasure—half the relaxing daydreaminess, at least—of a Pooh film is going to be in its backdrops of inviting backyard woods and half-formed stuffed animal domiciles, and Winnie the Pooh, still a relaxing and daydreamy experience at heart despite whatever I've said about the spikiness of its comedy, understands this implicitly. There is no sterility to these backdrops (not something always true for Piglet's Big Movie, that's for damned sure), lovingly reviving the watercolored sketch storybook imagery of the 70s film, or perhaps the even-better "final form" of 1983's short, "Winnie the Pooh and a Day For Eeyore," all in turn inspired by E.A. Shepard. (Now, The Search For Christopher Robin's backgrounds were cooler, but it was cheating, sending our toy heroes on an alpine quest and thus confronting them with the incongruous novelty of enormous rock formations that looked, in one case, like a death's head.)
Anyway, the Hundred Acre Wood is exactly right here, sumptuous in all the little scratchy details of its surfaces, despite also being, by definition, sketchy and minimalistic, generating, practically automatically, that gentle throwback sensation you crave—right up until digital effects animation enters the picture. We can quibble about the reality of pencil marks that made it into The Many Adventures' xerography and the scrubbed-clean digital ink-and-paint workflow of Winnie the Pooh, but the digital effects animation has no place here at all, almost exclusively feeling like the violent imposition of an uglier century. (If it's ever a strength, it's only in Pooh's descent into honey-seeking madness.) It's not overwhelming, but there's more than one occasion for CGI dust clouds, and it's fearsomely wrong every time, and there's at least one instance of digitally warping the backdrops, specifically to effect some of the more kinetic comedy of Tigger and Eeyore's plot; instead of drawing "a fence buckling," somebody decided it'd be easier to fuck with it in what amounts to MSPaint, and I'm sure it was, though while the visual that results should've been immediately reproached as a travesty, instead it's in a theatrically-released animated feature.
But I will draw your attention to something that could go entirely unnoticed: Winnie the Pooh is absolutely enamored with The Many Adventures' metatextual conceit of the text of Pooh's own story being an accessible part of this bear of little brain's world, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be. There's an argument that this film goes back to this well too frequently (I daresay somebody interacts with the book or the narrator more than a dozen times), but I would not make that argument with anything like passion, because every time I thought it had exhausted the joke it puts another novel wrinkle into how it's going to use it this time; it's always funny, and always making you think about how language creates this world, not too unlike how it creates our world, and how it's ironic that Christopher Robin has clearly just started learning how to read, but this gives his imaginary friends leave to play with language and meaning in ways that wouldn't even occur to an adult. (Christopher Robin does know what "back soon" says, after all, but it sounded like a good name for a creature to him.) Except... it's not a book, is it? The Many Adventures used words and pictures printed or prepared upon paper, which were then photographed; Winnie the Pooh doesn't (it sometimes pretends it's a book, with a gradient effect), and there's just something the tiniest bit unwholesome about these sharp digital characters from a word processor, all pixels that have never been anything besides pixels (and more noticeably than in stills when a "camera" is "moving" "over" them), representing a story tethered as tightly as this one is to nostalgia, to the ways of childhood of a vanished past, and, indeed, to the sensations of touching and manipulating physical objects that are such an important part of childhood play, almost explicitly the thing we're watching here.
On the other hand, without modern technology, I'm fairly certain this Pooh film's answer to The Many Adventures' "Heffalumps and Woozles" freakout would've been infeasible, even if it ironically hearkens the closest of anything here to the organic messiness of the techniques of a bygone day. This is the musical sequence "The Backson," wherein Owl prompts his easily-misled friends into helping him brainstorm up some paranoid fantasies revolving around the creature of that name, and even the way it's framed by the regular animation is pretty old-school Disneyesque, concluding with the characters marching out in military order chanting "the Backson" in a manner that, of all the animation in the whole movie, becomes the closest to indistinguishable from The Many Adventures' (it also buttons it with the terrific joke lyric, "we'll be back soon" which almost perturbs Owl into an actual intelligent thought; I should probably wedge it in somewhere, especially having mentioned that Kristen Anderson-Lopez is in the cast, that Winnie the Pooh's biggest "legacy" is that its songs were written by Anderson-Lopez and her husband Robert Lopez, and while they establish with "The Backson" the pattern of writing only one song in a soundtrack that I genuinely like, they had now placed themselves on the inside track to writing one song in an otherwise-forgettable Disney soundtrack that was about to upend the entire fucking world). Anyway, the meat of this sequence is the moving chalk drawing that chronicles the gang's increasingly-fanciful elaborations on the behavior and habits of the Backson, deliriously unstable in its color and just full of fun in its evocation of childhood whimsy, and since I've already said Eric Goldberg was on this movie, you can presumably guess who oversaw this mighty formal break, which is Winnie the Pooh's single finest two and a half minutes.
So, as prone to grousing as I am, there's a lot to love here, including the agreeable morality tale of Pooh grappling with his demonic appetite, ultimately having to decide if he values his responsibilities to his friends more than honey, and considering what a low opinion the movie has of Pooh, there's the feeling that it comes by its drama of whether Pooh can go another ten minutes without breakfast more-or-less honestly. At the risk of tiresomely repeating myself, I hate that this trifle was the final statement from Disney concerning the art form that created them, and that the last traditional animated feature from Disney is basically just Winnie the Pooh 10, and by normal metrics it's something seemingly more fit for a television special than a theatrical release—The Princess and the Frog would certainly have been a more dignified end—and it doesn't even attempt the emotional power The Many Adventures has for the adult viewer, who recognizes that its ending is the beginning of the end of Christopher Robin's childhood. But considered as a trifle, it's an excellent trifle, living up to the warm, bright, and, yes, trifling ethos of the first set of adventures we had with this silly old bear, so many years ago.
Score: 7/10
*But not on my blu-ray, which did die.
**I'm sorry, I said I'd stop, but it doesn't even have 53.5 minutes of actual animated content.
***There's a very fun post-credits gag, by the way.
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