Winnie the Pooh 2011
It is hard not to like Winie the Pooh. I bought the Blu-ray of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh from the Disney Movie Club and was a little surprised how much it was for very little kids. There is this great group of characters that we know and like, but unfortunately not much in the way of actual development. While the earlier movie was pieced together from three different short films, this movie has a more cohesive story, but it is very short at only 63 minutes and that is with about 10 minutes of credits (including a good post credits scene). There are a lot of amusing parts and certainly a lot of cuteness, but this is very familiar territory as Pooh looks for honey, Eeyore looks for his tail, and the rest of the cast is worried about a made up monster (this time the Backson, last time the Heffalump). There are some good fourth wall jokes about the text of the book, maybe more up front this time, but also pretty creative. I still think kids will like it, and even I liked it, but I didn’t feel like they were trying that hard and it feels a little more like a direct to video feature than a theatrical release. There are a couple of new songs and some of the old songs, but they aren’t that central to the movie, with some more pop oriented songs in the closing credits. With such a long-running group of characters, the voice actors have changed over the years, and while Pooh sounds the same, some of the others seemed a little off. I was glad to get a chance to watch this on Disney Plus, which just came out this week, since this movie hasn’t been available on Blu-ray and now I don’t feel like I need to buy it anyway.
Written: 16 Nov 2019