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 is a graphic novel that makes use of frames from the original movie for illustrations. A veritable army of creators led by Robert Greenberger clipped and pasted the art into a six-panel grid and copied the movie script word-for-word directly into the word balloons. It is a faithful recreation of the movie on paper, but actually took my daughter and me two or three times longer to read than it did for us to watch the movie.

As we read, we found scenes in the movie that lasted a few seconds elongate to minutes as each frame of action gets the exact same size panel. So, for instance, Pooh taking a couple steps can last a whole page, doffing his cap is another full page -- all as if the film is unrolling in slow motion. And since most of the film's visual gags are included, there are a lot of nearly wordless pages, but they still take a while to "read" as you decipher the pantomime from stills that were designed to have dozens of images between them to help any particular nanosecond make sense.

It is interesting though to see an adaptation that actually does a full adaptation of a film's musical sequences. Usually in this sort of thing songs are skipped entirely or are referenced with just a line or two, often pretending that the character is just saying the lines instead of breaking into song and dance. But here we get the full lyrics of every song (except, curiously, Zooy Deschanel's closing credits original song) and the full choreography. But unlike the movie I couldn't absorb the music and visuals simultaneously, so there was a bit of a dissonance as I read the words and then looked at the pictures.

So I'm going to chalk this up as an interesting failure. It's not a pleasant reading experience, but it is still at least a novel experience. And the script from the movie is good regardless of how much the pacing is thrown off in this format.

FOR REFERENCE:

Cinestory Credits:
Adaptation, Design, Lettering, Layout and Editing:
Robert Greenberger, Ester Salguero, Eduardo Alpuente, Alberto Garrido, Heidi Roux, Aaron Sparrow, Carolynn Prior, Robert Simpson, Amy Weingartner, Stephanie Alouche.

Original Film Credits:
Directed by Stephen J. Anderson (as Stephen Anderson) and Don Hall.
Story by Stephen J. Anderson (as Stephen Anderson), Clio Chiang, Don Dougherty, Don Hall, Kendelle Hoyer, Brian Kesinger, Nicole Mitchell, and Jeremy Spears.
Based on the "Winnie the Pooh" works by A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard.
Original songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. "Winnie the Pooh" and "The Wonderful Thing about Tiggers" written by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman. "So Long" written and performed by Zooey Deschanel

Source material:
• 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... ) ( )