D52 Week 22: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh!

Does it count as an embarrassing confession to say that I really, really loved Winnie the Pooh when I was a rather small child? I never got to watch The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh as a whole, but I did own the three shorts individually on VHS. I was also quite fond of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the series, and while I figure it probably wouldn't hold up terribly well today, I assume it would hold up better than, say, something like The Book of Pooh, or that one where they killed off Christopher Robin so they could replace him with a little girl. I'm not fully sure WHY I liked Pooh so much, because it's actually really hard to put early childhood tastes into words, but I figure it's just because, at one point, when I was young, I just had a particularly gentle sense of humour, something which probably isn't as true now. So, I really didn't know what to expect when I revisited these three shorts so many years later! And the end result was a surprisingly pleasant one. The TV serieseses that followed were very much for small, small children, but in these original shorts, there was something more than that - a feeling that the Hundred-Acre Wood was a place, even a society, as opposed to just a series of forest-like backdrops for semi-educational quasi-hijinx. (Confession: I have not, at this time, seen the 2011 film, so I don't know if this bitchiness applies to it yet or not.)

Still, there's one somewhat off-putting thing about this movie, that's a little hard to completely look past. After the last couple weeks of conceptual and artistic cannibalism on the studio's part, I suppose it should be no surprise that STEP THREE in Disney's identity crisis is full-blown unabashed reuse of previous materials, in their entirety! The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has the dubious distinction of being Disney's first package film since the 1940s, a collection of three animated shorts (that aren't really that short), and if you can recall what a chore 1940s Disney was to relive, you'll....understand why some scepticism makes sense. Still, the reasoning behind uniting these ("Here are some animated shorts that all involve the same group of characters having adventures together!") sure as hell beats the reasoning behind Make Mine Music and Melody Time ("Here are some animated shorts that all involve popular styles of music shoehorned in!"), or Fun and Fancy Free and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad ("Here are two half-finished things that have nothing in common!"). I'll concede that Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros had reasonable reasons to exist, though, for the world was at war. The world! At war! For the second time!

The problem with this, though - and it really is just a small problem - is that new linking material had to be made to connect the three segments, and that new material feels considerably more awkward than everything else in the film. I'm gonna have to assume this can be blamed on a combination of a stricter budget, and Wolfgang Reitherman just generally becoming more Wolfgangly and Reithermanic as he got older. He directed the original shorts, too, and they look great, as they should. The new bits, meanwhile, are VERY obvious in their animation recycling. In the finale, as Christopher Robin wanders around the Hundred-Acre Wood with Pooh and discusses the reality that he must, sadly, go away to school now, I'm aware that it's supposed to be an emotional moment....and yet, I can't stop thinking about how they're basically climbing over this assorted terrain for the sole purpose of allowing Reitherman to reuse entire Mowgli animation sequences from The Jungle Book. It had only been a decade by this point, but I swear that he'd probably already managed to reuse most of the animation from that film already!

So, y'know what? Let's just ignore these linking bits. They're not even important. Nobody really cares about those. This film exists only as an excuse to re-release these three rather excellent shorts, and on that level it works just fine, even if watching all three in a row might be the teensiest bit trying. (But that's what scene selection's for, now, isn't it?) There's just so much stuff here that I don't even feel even a little embarrassment in saying is quite good! How can you not love the Sherman Brothers, for instance? And this film has some of their most famous work! And there's a sense of character here that surprisingly many Disney features lack, clearly more thanks to A. A. Milne's unique way with words than anything Disney did themselves, but still, it's nice. And I'd argue that Pooh deserves more credit as one of the earliest examples in fiction of the completely useless (but nonetheless oddly charming) freeloader. (OF COURSE he'd be the sort of guy to fall asleep at important town hall-type meetings, too.)

One odd little thing I noticed is the idea that these characters (or, well, the ones that Milne didn't base on actual living animals, anyway) are stuffed animals....and how that has been downplayed almost completely in subsequent adaptations. Heck, actually, it's pretty much downplayed in everything after "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree"! In that short, we see Pooh split his hiney open while doing his "stoutness exercises" (which, might I add, would be BEYOND horrifying if he weren't merely stuffed, with fluff), and all the talk of Eeyore being stuffed with sawdust. After that, I guess they figured it was kind of weird to underline it like that? At any rate, it's probably for the best to have downplayed it, because everyone knows that a teddy bear in a flood would just absorb water until it became saturated and heavy and sluggish.

I suppose I should also mention the fourth "classic" Pooh short, "Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore", which was made after Many Adventures and isn't actually part of the film, but it IS on the DVD, as an extra. And it's....pretty awful, by comparison. The animation is a lot "cleaner", in the sense that it's even less complex and missing any sense of soul. There's inanely dorky music plodding along in the background at all times, as though it was the score to the 4Kids dub of Winnie the Pooh. And the voices, oh god, the voices are so far off! I cast particular shame on Will Ryan's interpretation of Rabbit*. IMDB tells me that Will Ryan voiced Winnie the Pooh for Family Guy's "Road to the North Pole", and I seem to recall that voice being fairly spot-on. Closer to being properly Poohish than Hal Smith's interpretation in this short, anyway, which makes me think they could've easily made it sound better just by shuffling around their voice actors a bit.

...but, again, that has no bearing on this movie. It's probably the most reasonable packageish film the studio ever put out, and it's fun, in a simple and easy-to-grasp way. Pooh is probably one of the biggest victims of Disney's love of spinoffs and spinoffs of spinoffs, joining Mickey Mouse as one of their classic family characters turned into generic everymen starring in extremely low-quality CGI-animated programs for preschoolers. That doesn't mean he didn't originate in something with more integrity. It's embarrassingly decent entertainment!

(Clicking to enlarge the Highly Informative Graph would probably be helpful.)

COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNWARRANTED DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK: Jeez, it's hard to think of one they haven't already done yet! Um. Winnie the Pooh and Rosh Hashanah Too? I'm sure he'd appreciate the honey-dipped apples! As long as he ate around the apples.


*I'm told that the voices were re-dubbed with the current official voice actors for the Friendship Edition DVD, but alas, I was using the older 25th Anniversary Edition, and so I'm bitching at the "classic" version here.