People are just going to see this review and think of me as a mean old curmudgeon.

Curmudgeon
Assuming you don’t already assume that.

But I was very disappointed with the new Winnie The Pooh movie.

Blah blah blah, kids will love it, super G, whatever. I hope no kids are reading this website anyways. Just in case they are, there is some bad fucking language in some of the reviews, so they should probably stay away from those.

My problems are as such. First, not counting the credits, this movie is pretty much exactly 60 minutes long. Why a person would rather watch this than a much more interesting hour long show on HBO or Showtime, I wouldn’t know. But just in terms of length (and content) it really just felt like a long episode of a TV show. Not a movie.

The animation itself also felt like it was identical to the original older movies/shows. I know why they did that, the same way they made this movie. To prey entirely on nostalgia for older people, and to introduce it to younger people to try and get more money. If nostalgia is the only reason you would like something new, or being very young, that cannot be a good enough reason for it to be good. I read a few other reviews of this, and most of them mention the nostalgic feeling.

Finally, this doesn’t really offer anything new. This is still based off of the original book series by A. A. Milne. In fact, some of the plots are stories that have already been done in movies (such as the Search For Christopher Robin).

I did enjoy the song about the Bakson, but that was because the animation was done in a creative way. John Cleese did an excellent job as narrator too. While there was some interesting moments in terms of interactions with the book pages and the characters, most of the humor comes from the normal lack of understanding on the part of Pooh.

In conclusion, if a well established series is going to release a movie after a period of downtime, it should a) Have something improved upon the earlier series, such as graphics (not saying boom boom 3D, but there is better 2D animation capabilities), b) Not just rehash all the earlier plots, and c) Be of “movie” quality, not just a longer cartoon tv show.

Tigger
Tigger, please.

1 out of 4.