Christopher Robin Review

Disney is at it again with yet another one of their live-action remakes of one of their classic animated property. This time it's off to the Hundred Acre Wood to give Winnie the Pooh and gang the live-action treatment. The spin this time around is that Christopher Robin is all grown up and has become a boring, dull adult who is obsessed with work to the point where he even neglects his wife and daughter. In other words, it's "Hook" but with Christopher Robin instead of Peter Pan, with touches of the forgotten toys arc of "Toy Story 3" and the CGI bear wandering through London arc of "Paddington." In other words, Disney was running real low on the creative juices when it came to the plot of this film, but hey it's Winnie the Pooh and none of us will care since we all love Winnie the Pooh, right? Well, yes actually. And we'll get to all of that in this review because this is an adorable movie that hits all the right notes with our beloved characters, thus doing justice to the Winnie the Pooh lore. I think this is a perfect late summer film for the whole family to enjoy. The young kids are going to love all of the characters while not caring about the derivative storyline while parents are going to be given a heavy dose of nostalgia as they return to the land that blessed their childhood.

First of all, let's talk about Winnie the Pooh because I haven't had a whole lot of opportunities to do so on this blog. The history of Winnie the Pooh began in 1924 with the original A.A. Milne book "Winnie-the-Pooh." Since then there have been many books, stories, animated shorts, movies, TV shows, TV specials and even video games with all of the characters. I honestly don't know if I have any specific allegiance to any of these individual stories, but I've always been a huge fan of these characters. In terms of theatrically released films, Disney's main branch of animation has produced the 1977 movie "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" and the 2011 movie simply titled "Winnie the Pooh." In my ranking, these two movies are No. 29 and No. 30 respectively among the now 56 animated movies from Walt Disney Animation Studios. If you think that's way too low, I'm sorry. Don't hurt me. I think that's a good spot for two movies that are both a short collection of fun Winnie the Pooh shorts. And yes, there's three other theatrically released Winnie the Pooh movies, that being "The Tigger Movie," "Piglet's Big Movie" and "Pooh's Heffalump Movie," but those were all DisneyToon, so I didn't include them in my main Disney rankings when I created that list a couple years back.

"Christopher Robin" is now the sixth theatrical released feature length film in the Winnie the Pooh franchise from one of Disney's branches. I don't know exactly where I would rank it among those since it's been a while since I've watched the three DisneyToon movies, but if I'm being honest right off the bat, I don't think I would ever turn to "Christopher Robin" over the 1977 or 2011 animated movies if I was in the mood for a Winnie the Pooh movie night, unless I was wanting to showcase the movie to Winnie the Pooh fans who haven't seen it because they chose to ignore this recommendation to do so, but at the same time I found myself very easily pleased by the experience, which is probably the case with most Winnie the Pooh stuff. I find myself very easily charmed by all of these characters because they're so innocent and lovable. Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, Rabbit, Kanga, Roo and Owl all have their own charm and personality as they're a very diverse group of characters. Whatever adventures they're all on, I'm on board to following them. While all of them are in this movie, the focus of "Christopher Robin" is Pooh and, of course, Christopher Robin. Pooh hasn't seen Christopher in a long time so he's out to find him.

I was curious to find out how much time this movie spent in the Hundred Acre Wood versus how much time it spent in London and the answer is that it's a decent balance of both. We start out in Hundred Acre Wood as all of the characters are saying goodbye to Christopher Robin as his parents are sending him off to boarding school. Then we get a montage of his life told in classic story book fashion showing brief sequences of each major milestone leading up to the point where Christopher Robin has now transformed into Ewan McGregor and has become completely obsessed with his work as an efficiency expert at a luggage company. He has a planned getaway weekend with his wife, played by Hayley Atwell, and their adorable little daughter, but he has to cancel the plans because his grumpy boss demands that he find a way to decrease expenditures by 20 percent before Monday, preferably by deciding who to lay off. So Christopher Robin has to cancel the weekend plans, but he sends his wife and daughter off to the countryside cottage anyways while he then plans to spend the entire weekend by himself figuring all this out. Which naturally makes for the perfect time for Pooh to wander back into his life after Pooh wakes up to find that all of his friends are missing.

I actually really enjoyed all the banter between Pooh and angry Christopher Robin. You would think that Christopher would be happy to see his old friend after all this time, but he really finds him to be more of an inconvenience. Pooh wants Christopher to come with him back to the Hundred Acre Wood to help him find his friends, but Christopher wants to focus on his work. So he comprises in that Christopher agrees that he'll help Pooh find his way back to the Hundred Acre Wood, which leads the two on an adventure through London. Pooh is his innocent, adorable, youthful self as he becomes fascinated with all of the sites, wants to talk to all of the people, is in a constant search for honey, begs Christopher to buy him a balloon. Meanwhile Christopher is always in a hurry, constantly is trying to get Pooh to be quieter, and is often embarrassed walking around with a stuffed teddy bear that he really doesn't want people to learn has the ability to talk. Pooh remains mostly unphased by all of this while he's constantly churning out a string of internet wisdom quote memes in response to Christopher's less than stellar reactions to everything. Said quotes got to be a little much at times as the movie tried too hard to be quotable, but I was mostly amused by all of it.

There are a lot of critics acting like Woozles when it comes to this movie, this phrase coming from later in this movie where the grumpy adults are referred to by our happier characters as Woozles after Christopher Robin himself is initially mistaken as a Heffalump by some of our characters who don't recognize the adult version of him when he finally makes his way to the Hundred Acre Wood. So yeah, since Heffalumps and Woozles have been a major part of Winnie the Pooh since early on, this movie takes full advantage of using them in both literal and figurative ways. I usually like referring to people as Grinches, but I kinda became amused with the idea of calling people Woozles instead. Anyways, the score on Rotten Tomatoes for "Christopher Robin" is currently at 71 percent, that being up from what it was initially when reviews started coming out. Hence me saying the critics are acting like Woozles. General audiences seem more on board with this as it has an 89 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes audience score, a 7.9 on IMDb and an A on Cinemascore. I think this can be a telling story. If you put on your critical hat and analyze this movie, there's plenty to complain about. But if you relax and enjoy the latest Winnie the Pooh adventure, you're going to have a good time.

If I were to put on my own Woozle hat, I'll admit that said comparisons that I brought up early in this review do hurt the experience when I think about it. All this story of Christopher and Pooh wandering through London reminded me a lot of both Paddington movies. And I have to admit that both Paddington movies are way better as they are able to incorporate an actual story that you become really invested in. The writing in the Paddington movies is sharp, refined and well thought out while "Christopher Robin" was more lazy and by the numbers, relying heavily on the nostalgia factor to entertain you rather than coming up with a story for you to care about. And speaking of nostalgia, Pixar used a heavy dose of it in "Toy Story 3," but implemented it perfectly as they made you think back on your own childhood and all your toys, thus becoming the golden standard for nostalgia. "Christopher Robin" does perfectly fine in this category as the characters sound and act as they should, but it's nowhere near the gold standard level of "Toy Story 3." Thus "Christopher Robin" ends up feeling a lot more derivative than it should rather than feeling fresh and rewarding. The movies it replicates, as well as the original animated content, all end up being better and that's a big problem.

Thus I can see why a lot of critics are acting like Woozles when it comes to this movie. If you see this movie and you end up being among the crowd of Woozles, I'm not going to stand up and boldly defend the movie is a timeless masterpiece. I'll totally empathize with you and all of your frustrations, especially when you can easily predict the entire plot of the movie the second it's announced. This isn't a situation where "the trailer spoiled the movie," even though it kinda does. The movie is spoiled the second Disney announced they're doing a live-action Winnie the Pooh movie with an adult Christopher Robin who has lost his youthful energy. And it's kinda frustrating when you see it played out as by the numbers as they come, making you think that Disney really just made this for the sake of money rather than a filmmaker coming up with the idea of a story that needed to be told. Disney thinking with dollar bills alone is extremely nerve-wracking because it makes you wonder why we're getting "Dumbo," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" next year in addition to wondering why "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" or "Mary Poppins Returns" from later on this year are necessary. And that's not even mentioning all the Star Wars or Marvel films they are going to make.

But do you know what? If it was Disney's goal to con me out of money by giving me a nostalgia-filled Winnie the Pooh adventure, when push comes to shove, they won. Disney seems to be working on a complete monopoly of the film industry, but if they continue to make movies that I enjoy, I'm not going to ignorantly fight the giant corporation just for the sake of doing so. You can be a Woozle about this movie, but deep down I'm going to be taking the Woozle hat off with "Christopher Robin." The story may be as generic as it comes, but I loved the way they used Winnie the Pooh and I loved Ewan McGregor's portrayal of Christopher Robin. The moments where they were sitting on the log, staring into the sunset while gladly doing nothing together were genuinely beautiful as said scenes were very reflective of this experience as a whole with the movie. Perhaps I could've used a bit more of the other characters. Eeyore was the second-most used character while Piglet and Tigger were mostly sidelined and Rabbit, Kanga, Roo and Owl were mostly cameos. And the look of the old-fashioned stuffed animals took a bit of getting used to, but didn't really bother me too much. Overall this was an enjoyable experience. I'll give "Christopher Robin" a strong 7/10.