Mario Cortes

The 2011 Winnie the Pooh animated movie is fairly strong based on the sheer amount of wordplay, visual gags, and slapstick crammed into its mere 63 minutes. With eight credited writers, I get the feeling it was like a sitcom writers' room where everyone was brainstorming jokes and situations both cheap and clever. It helps that this is another Pooh film that actually draws on the original A. A. Milne source material, loosely adapting three different chapters (see below) wherein Eeyore's loses his tail, a busy Backson may have made off with Christopher Robin, and a pit dug to capture the beast captures Pooh instead. (In a bit of Disney recycling, the Backson chapter was also the very loose starting point for a previous film, Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin.) My only disappointment with the film is that the songs are simply good, not nearly as catchy as the stuff written by the Sherman Brothers or Carly Simon.

This adaptation by Lisa Ann Marsoli is a serviceable, giving a faithful rendition of the story even if it doesn't quite capture the humor and zest of it. Mario Cortes, Valeria Turati, and the Disney Storybook Artists provide some fine art, though they fall a little short in showing how the literal text of the story interacts with the characters in the film.

A nice effort, overall.

FOR REFERENCE:

Original Disney animated film directed by Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall; story by Stephen J. Anderson, Don Hall, Brian Kesinger, Clio Chiang, Don Dougherty, Kendelle Hoyer, Nicole Mitchell, and Jeremy Spears; and adapted from A. A. Milne's:
• Winnie-the-Pooh Chapter Four: In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One
• Winnie-the-Pooh Chapter Five: In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump
• The House at Pooh Corner Chapter Five: In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day, and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... )… (meer)