Winnie the Pooh [2011, Stephen J. Anderson & Don Hall] (5.1)


Pretty slack, unfortunately. Excluding the longest end credits in recent memory, this barely cracks the 50-minute mark, and it’s essentially just your everyday Winnie the Pooh story drawn out to (barely) feature length. The post modern text play is fun, but bogs further into the educational moralizing typical of the Pooh franchise, tacking on an elementary lesson in semantics. I’m all for kids getting served some life lessons with their entertainment, but I felt too old for this material. Also, since I did grow up on the short episodes (my dad would either wake me up at 7am to watch them, or set the VCR to record them for me), I found the variances in the voices, however slight, and despite not having seen any Pooh material in two decades, more than unsettling – Eeyore especially. Not to mention that I never really understood until now that Winnie the Pooh is actually a complete moron – gluttony at its worst, until he makes the ‘choice’ to return Eeyore’s tail instead of eating some honey, although he could have very easily done both at the same time.