The earliest origin of Winnie the Pooh is in 1914 as Canadian Lt. Harry Colebourn bought a bear cub who had been raised with people and was thus quite gentle. He named the female bear Winnipeg or "Winnie." Traveling with the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps, she became their mascot and was eventually left in the care of the London Zoo.
It was at the London Zoo that she attracted the attention of a little boy named Christopher Robin Milne, who liked her so much that his teddy bear (formerly Edward Bear) was renamed Winnie-the-Pooh. Young Christopher's imagination and games he played with his stuffed animals became the inspiration for verse and stories by his father, Alan Alexander Milne, who would write two books of poems featuring fictionalized versions of young Christopher and his bear and two books of stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, Christopher Robin and all of their friends in the Forest.
The fiction of A.A. Milne became a worldwide hit, having captured the imagination of readers with a frank and honest portrayal of how a child sees the world.
However, young Christopher was not pleased about the fame he had been exposed to. When he went off to boarding school, he was bullied for his connection to the stories. He and his parents would eventually become estranged, although in the end, he made peace with his father. The existing toys that inspired the stories are currently on display in the New York Public Library, and a lot of tourism and preservation of Ashdown Forest is owed to what the Milnes did.
The fictional world of Winnie-the-Pooh was adapted for radio and stage, and eventually television and film, most famously by Walt Disney's animated featurettes that were eventually compiled into the feature film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Disney wasn't the only one to bring Pooh to film, as Shirley Temple's television show had previously adapted several of the Pooh stories using large marionettes. Soyuzmultfilm, the famous Russian animation studio, also released a trilogy of Pooh animated shorts. But Disney has certainly had the most media presence with four television shows, additional shorts, a variety of small release and direct to video films, and a 2011 proper animated sequel to Many Adventures simply titled Winnie the Pooh.
Fans of the characters have long debated as to how different Disney's version is from the original Milne version. There are many thoughtful comparisons, but I won't go into them now.
I had often thought that I would like to see a different film version of the stories. Since Pooh and many of his friends are toys, it would be interesting to see living toys onscreen interacting with the boy who owned them, in addition to Rabbit and Owl, who were supposed to be actual forest animals. Shirley Temple's television version had come pretty close with the marionettes. My personal favorite version of the Milne stories are readings by the late Peter Dennis, which of course offered no visuals, but let you imagine a Pooh different from Disney's.
And so, I was very interested to hear about Christopher Robin, a new offering by Disney which would be their first attempt at a live action Pooh with CGI. (The television series Welcome to Pooh Corner featured the characters as people in full-body costumes and the later The Book of Pooh depicted them with puppets with some CGI enhancements.) The thing is, it would also be a sequel to the main Pooh stories by depicting an adult Christopher Robin. This past Tuesday, I went to my local cinema, took care of a "rumbly in my tumbly" with some nachos, and watched the film.
There was no doubt that the fictional adult Christopher Robin would differ greatly from the real Christopher Robin Milne. Perhaps at the most simplified theme, they are similar in that they leave Pooh and his friends behind and happily return to them later. Both do get married and have a daughter.
The film opens with a celebration in the Hundred Acre Wood (Disney's name for the Forest, which wasn't named in Milne's stories, though there is a Hundred Acre Wood in the Forest), and you see the main Pooh characters Disney focused on: Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Tigger. They are depicted throughout the film with CGI that remembers most of them are living toys and Owl and Rabbit are real animals. (Disney has seemingly dropped their original character Gopher and they never used Rabbit's Friends and Relations.) They're joined by a young Christopher Robin, yet it's a boy who's getting older and taller, about to go through puberty.
The loving care that Disney took to these opening scenes actually made this fan of the Milne stories tear up.
A curious thing about this film is that it depicts the Hundred Acre Wood as another world that Christopher can access via the green door in a tree. In the original stories, Christopher is said to live "behind a green door in another part of the Forest," so I suppose this interpretation is completely valid. I had always assumed Christopher Robin arriving in the Forest was when the little boy would go to play.
Years pass for Christopher and major events take place in his life. His father dies, he goes to boarding school, he begins work, he meets a lovely woman named Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) that he marries and has a daughter with, and he serves in the second World War.
When the story finally slows down to a regular pace, Christopher (Ewan McGregor) is now probably at the youngest in his late 30s (McGregor himself is a few years from fifty) and has no time to think of his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood. In fact, he lets his job at Winslow Luggage keep him so busy that he barely has time for Evelyn or his daughter Madeline (Bronte Carmichael). At this particular time, his employer Giles (Mark Gatiss) has made him work the same weekend that he and his family were going to go to Sussex. This means Evelyn and Madeline leave without him.
Over in the Hundred Acre Wood, Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings, who also voices Tigger) looks around for his friends, but can't find them. With no other choice, he heads to the green door and steps out into a park a frustrated Christopher happens to go to. Irritated at being interrupted and knowing his wife is right about how much he has to work, Christopher reluctantly has to go to Sussex so he can return Pooh to the Hundred Acre Wood.
The story of course goes on further with a reclamation of Christopher's childhood joys and a merry chase as Pooh, Piglet (voiced by Nick Mohammed), Tigger and Eeyore (voiced by Brad Garrett) meet Madeline who tries to return her father's papers to him after they were left behind in the Hundred Acre Wood.
The film is very sweet and of course has the message that you can keep your imagination alive as an adult and to make sure you make time for really matters most. Perhaps it's a little too on the nose for some, as several critics have detracted it. But for Pooh fans like me, while it might not be the most perfect adaptation of Milne's characters, bringing the simple nature of Pooh to an adult character just felt more in keeping with the spirit with the original stories than any of the animated films or shorts.
To me, it was a great joy to see the Pooh characters lovingly realized in three dimensions on the big screen set in a real forest (scenes were actually filmed in the real Ashdown Forest in Sussex, which was the basis of the Forest in the original stories). I would love it if Disney could return to the original Milne stories and depict them again (throughout the many Pooh animated features, most of the stories have been adapted for animation somehow) in this manner. Perhaps something for that new streaming service they're working on?
In any case, if you love tributes to classic literature (the film does pay many a homage to the original books), Winnie-the-Pooh, or just fun little movies that entertain, check out Christopher Robin before it leaves cinemas!
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