Winnie the Pooh (2011)


And now to the recent follow up film, we have Winnie the Pooh.

The Movie:

 Winnie the Pooh is the 51st movie in the Disney Animated Canon (unless you are in the UK, which for some reason doesn't include it).  It falls near the beginning of Disney's Revival Period, smack between the hits Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph.  As of today, it is the last 2D animated film in the canon.  Though the movie received almost universally positive reviews, it underperformed at the box-office, owing in part to opening the same weekend as the final Harry Potter movie.

Winnie the Pooh is once again based on the characters from the A.A. Milne books.  This movie also has three main plot points, but in this movie they are intertwined into a single narrative.  The first plot thread is Pooh being hungry and trying to find honey.  (That almost seems like a given.)  The second plot thread is that Eeyore has lost his tail, and the others try to find different objects to be a replacement.  The third plot point is Owl misinterprets a note left by Christopher Robin and thinks he has been captured by a beast called the Backson, so the gang tries to capture the Backson to save Christopher Robin.

Like the previous movie, this one is cute and charming, but it is definitely a kid's movie, even more so than the first.  The animation is fine, the story nicely done, and there are once again some nice gags with the narrator and the book illustrations.  There are even a couple of genuinely fun moments of dialogue, especially the bit with Piglet and the knots.  The post-credits stinger also got a chuckle.

The new songs for this movie are done by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.  Yes, the Frozen people.  This is the movie that earned them that job.  So yes, the songs are fine, with some really nice moments of wordplay, but at times they veer a bit too much into cuteness.  "The Backson Song" and "Everything is Honey" are the best of the bunch.  The movie opens with a cover of the original Sherman Brothers song by Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward, and I really didn't like it.  Their end credit song "So Close," written by Deschanel, is a bit more tolerable.  Henry Jackman did the score, and it does have some nice moments.

Presence in the Parks:

Well, by the time this movie came out, Winnie the Pooh already had a pretty big presence in the parks, as covered in the previous entry.  So nothing new was really added as a result of this one.

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