WINNIE THE POOH Discussion

Whoa, touchy. I'll probably see this too, though I have a four-year-old brother I can bring along for appearances sake. I'm a big fan of hand-done animation, and if anything can give it a boost it's a film featuring one of Disney's best-selling properties.

It's so goddamn cute. I'll have a review by Friday- but it's great to see a children's movie that is wonderful and well-made in an entirely different manner than a Pixar film.

Yeah, count me in as well. I freaking love Pooh, and this looks to be in the same gentle, whimsical spirit as the original shorts. I'm looking forward in particular to Tom Kenny's vocal take on Rabbit as well as Craig Ferguson's Owl.

Any merit to the early whining about it being too short?

I don't know why exactly, but the scene in the trailer where Pooh thinks Owl sneezed absolutely fucking kills me. Pooh seems absolutely disgusted when he says "You sneezed", shaking his head like he's never been so offended in all of his life. And then, when Eeyore chimes in that he is probably gonna get sick as well, Pooh starts nodding his head like a madman.

Funniest thing I've seen this whole summer.

No merit to whining. It's 68 minutes and aimed at four-year-olds. Any longer and I would have checked out.

I thought not. How long is the Ballad of Nessie short that's supposed to be before it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris Spider 

I thought not. How long is the Ballad of Nessie short that's supposed to be before it?

Five minutes? Felt like a typical pre-movie short in the Pixar mold.

Andreas Deja, one of my favorite Disney animators is drawing Tigger in this movie, so I'm really looking forward to it just for the artistic merits and hope my kids enjoy it.

I covered this and got to hang out with Eric Goldberg for a bit. Legend. Awesome. The movie is utterly charming, way better than you'd think. I hope it leads to more cel animation from Disney.

Is it wrong that I'm more excited about a new Pooh movie that evokes the original shorts I grew up with than I am about a single superhero property this year?

I saw the movie earlier this evening. I wasn't too keen on the short right before it (although I appreciate its nice message for kids), but I enjoyed the whole movie. Very sweet, simple, and surprisingly funny. I was either smiling or laughing the whole time, and I can't think of many movies that have got such a reaction from me. It made me nostalgic for the "Winnie the Pooh" shorts I loved as a kid (as I'd hoped it would) and had a very innocent and endearing story. 

It made me think of "Rugrats" and "Toy Story" with its reverence for the way imagination can take kids to great places when they play. This is conveyed nicely by a series of shots before the closing credits, which show stuffed animals of the movie's characters reenacting some of its scenes. The cast slipped into their roles very comfortably. The original voice actors of Tigger and Piglet (Paul Winchell and John Fiedler, respectively) had such distinctive voices that I was afraid they couldn't be done justice by replacements. Fortunately, the new actors did a splendid job.

Tigger sounded a little off at times, but I think that's mostly because I'm so familiar with the voice actor playing him (Jim Cummings). I could hear Darkwing Duck coming through just a teensy bit once in a while, but for the most part, he was solid. My favourite performance was Craig Ferguson as Owl. I'm familiar with Ferguson from his late night show and think of him as more of a host than actor, so I was surprised by how well he was able to bury himself in the character. I couldn't hear his real voice at all and thought he played the character very faithfully to the original. 

Another pleasant surprise was how clever both the dialog and visuals of the movie were at times. There was some ingenious punning/wordplay with "knot" and "not" in one scene (worthy of Abbot & Costello), and a neat-o scene in which a story told in chalk was animated. Seeing the characters rendered and animated as chalk figures was such a delightful artistic choice. This brought back memories of the inspired scene in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" where the characters appear as yarn plush dolls.

All of the characters come across rather dim and naive, but in the most charming way possible. Especially Owl, who got huge laughs from me with his unbelievable obliviousness and hilariously overinflated opinion of himself. I dug the songs by Zooey Deschanel too, but that was like a foregone conclusion since I've always liked her music. All of the songs in the movie (both hers and those sung by characters) were fun. The only bad part of the experience of watching this movie was seeing how small the audience was. The fact that the last Harry Potter movie opened this weekend is undoubtedly a big reason why. I hope this movie finds more of an audience over the next few weeks. It certainly deserves one.

Consideing how short the film is (68mins), do Theatres take advantage of this by having more screenings? Just curious.

I don't know how it is in the U.S., but in the Canadian city I live in, the movie's distribution seemed to be really limited. I had to go to two different theatres to find it (I couldn't believe movies 5-7 weeks into release were being kept instead of giving it a screening), and there seemed to be multiple Harry Potter screenings. Again, I really hope this changes in the next few weeks as the Potter hype dies down.

Never before has a film about an addict, a narcissist, a roid-rager, a depressive, a wimp, a single mother and child and a curmudgeon attempting to rescue a young boy been so utterly charming. Had a bad day and this just picked me up and whisked me away. Simple and sweet. Liked Ferguson as Owl, but I've seen so much Winnie the Pooh that it's hard to shake the original voice from my head.

Great movie. Loved the 'Winnie is freaking out!' honey scene.

70 minutes of happiness. Period. Every cynical cell in my brain was disabled during the runtime of this. Every thing about it is just running on charm and imagination. The jokes based on wordplay are effortlessly clever.  The animation is warm and inviting in a way you just dont see anymore, anywhere. Zooey Deschanel's voice is a sweetly perfect fit for the songs. There's more charm in the animation during the credits* than there is in the entirety of Cars 2. The whole is just such a pleasant, satisfying little ride. The respite from the blockbusters is appreciated more than Disney will ever know.

*--Speaking of which, did anybody else stick around for the post-credits bit? It's the logical capper to the running joke, but it's handled perfectly.

I thought the end credits thing was kind of pointless, actually. After all, part of what made the running gag so funny was that the monster clearly didn't exist. They're all freaking out over something that's completely made-up based on misreading a word. Showing the actual monster sort of defeats the purpose. That's probably the only thing in the whole movie that I found blah, because I otherwise enjoyed every minute of it. Loved seeing the characters interacting with the end credits too. 

This was just *ridiculously* happy and charming. Laundry list!:

-Eeyore still cracks me the hell up with anything he says, and the increasingly ridiculous tails were great visual gags. Bud Luckey was beautiful on the vocal end, though I confess I would've been perfectly OK with Peter Cullen reprising the role (guess he's too busy with Optimus Prime now).

-Similarly, I loved Craig Ferguson and Tom Kenny's voicework. Ferguson adopts a perfect pompous semi-British accent for Owl (I never saw his work on Drew Carey, so I didn't know he could do that, as I'm only familiar with his INCREDIBLY Scottish accent), and Kenny is terrifically neurotic as Rabbit.

-Cummings has actually been doing Pooh and Tigger for a good while now, so his great acting was less surprising, though still very rewarding.

-Roo unexpectedly gets the funniest line of the movie: "Send the pig". I loved how Kanga and Roo got just as caught up in the nonsense as everybody else. It really shows that even though these guys try to act mature, they're still mentally children. Which makes perfect sense,  of course (they are a small boy's stuffed animals, after all).

-I never got in on the Zooey Deschanel backlash, which frankly continues to baffle me, so her gentle, husky voice suited the theme and the end credits song perfectly for me.

-The animation is perhaps a little more cartoony than the original shorts at points, but this only works to its benefit. I doubt the scenes in the hole would've been nearly as funny without Rabbit's twitchiness and frustration coming out through his body language. Everyone else's animation is great too, and I love that they didn't skimp on the movie despite the lower budget. No, they put essentially their superstar animators on the job like Mark Henn, Eric Goldberg, and Andreas Deja, and I couldn't be happier. The backgrounds are also lovely as hell, calling back the original shorts' design style.

-The book conceit works better here than it has in a while (adored them using the letters to make a ladder), and John Cleese is the perfect warm, yet slightly sarcastic narrator.

-Am I the only one astonished by them actually giving Pooh a character arc? Sure, it was a simple one, but it works surprisingly well, and it's very sweet at the end when he gives Eeyore back his tail and gets the big-ass honeypot.

-The surreal scene where Pooh imagines everyone and everything as honey (even the words in the book!) that transitions into a brief musical number was like a way less terrifying Heffalumps and Woozles.

I'd love to see this win the Oscar for best animated feature, but I'm sure "Happy Feet 2" will take the prize. I just watched the timeless classic "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day", and while this movie wasn't quite at that level, it was in the same spirit. It doesn't have anything as astonishingly imaginative and haunting as the masterpiece Heffalumps and Woozles scene, but few movies do.

The biggest pleasant surprise to me was how well written "Winnie the Pooh" was and how excellent its performances were, now that the 'old guard' cast from the 60s-90s features has been replaced. This movie hasn't had the success it deserves and won't get the awards love it deserves, but I hope at least someday it's rightfully recognized as a classic. It's especially refreshing when you consider some of the pablum that passes for family entertainment these days.

To be fair, Naisu, Jim Cummings has been voicing Pooh consistently since 1988's premiere of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh TV series; he occasionally played Tigger even when Paul Winchell was still alive, then took over the latter role completely once Winchell sadly passed.

Travis Oates has also been voicing Piglet for the past few years since the death of John Fiedler.