Winnie The Pooh (2011) Review

Alright. Just because I’m a 25 year old man doesn’t mean I can’t say that I enjoy Winnie The Pooh. My mother has always been a Winnie The Pooh fan and I practically grew up in a house that was heavily inundated with Pooh paraphernalia. My sisters and I always enjoyed watching the classic 1977 “The Many Adventures Of Winnie the Pooh” because it was charming, well written, and downright hilarious at times. While some of the jokes whizzed over our heads, the magic of “Pooh” was never lost on us.

As boys are wont to do, there is that stage in life where they feel they’ve “Grown out of the baby stuff” and wish to get onto bigger and better things. I’m not afraid to admit that I myself went through such a stage. It really began when my father chucked a copy of Lord Of The Rings at my 11 year old self’s head back in 2000, about a year before “The Fellowship Of The Ring” was to be released. “You need to read this” he said. Happily, I devoured the book and with that leap into a wider world of literature, my life changed forever.

It would be another 7 years until I came across “Winnie The Pooh” again. I distinctly remember heading downstairs one cold Saturday afternoon to find my sisters sitting on the couch and promptly asking me to watch a movie with them. I obliged and with a squeal of delight they popped our dusty VHS copy of “The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh” into the VCR and pressed play. It was awesome. Having not watched it in so long, I found that the film was unbelievably nostalgic and now… I was understanding all the jokes. How had I missed this before?! It was so unbelievably funny just thinking about it makes me crack up.

One of my favorite recurring jokes throughout the picture is how many times the narrator interacts with the characters and smashes the fourth wall into oblivion. In retrospect it would seem that Winnie the Pooh is actually a bit self-centered and has a pretty harmless ego. It’s just so interesting to me looking at the movie and noticing such things nowadays.

Anyway… Onto the real subject of this article. Back in 2011 I was still serving in the submarine force so I didn’t have a whole lot of time for movies or even sunlight for that matter. So unbeknownst to me, Disney released the movie “Winnie The Pooh.” Admittedly, even if I had known about the picture I would not have gone to see it in the theaters. That’s not a slight agains the film so much as a commentary on my personal moviegoing tastes.

However, just last week one of my friends here at college recommended that we watch it together because she had recently seen it and thought it was good. I was incredulous at first but finally caved in and decided that I would watch it voluntarily. Mind you, I have a deep love for the classic Winnie The Pooh, so I was very cautious about this movie. As iterated before, I had grown up watching this stuff and didn’t want Disney soiling “Pooh’s” legacy with a schlocky movie. Because Disney is so well known for it’s “Quality” sequels.

Of course, this was before Disney had begun making/releasing the abomination that is “My Friends Tigger and Pooh” on the Disney Channel back in 2013. (No I’ve never watched it but from what I’ve seen it has all the appeal of pond scum)

Ugh... Just looking at this makes me angry...

So, we sat down and watched it and for 53 and a half minutes I was once again reliving the magic that is Winnie the Pooh. While the movie was obviously made with modern animation techniques, and the writers were obviously from this century, what stuck out more than anything else was just how faithful they were to the soul of Winnie The Pooh. Once I had gotten over the obviously different voice actors, I found myself absolutely loving the film. The jokes were fresh, the animation was stunning, and the attention to detail was mind-blowing.

This is a movie that, in my opinion, that went above and beyond in the pursuit of quality storytelling. I loved it, I highly recommend it to everyone who has ever loved “Winnie The Pooh.”