Win­nie the Pooh

Disney’s Win­nie the Pooh fol­lows the bear who’s always got his mind on his hon­ey and his hon­ey on his mind back into the Hun­dred Acre Wood; intro­duc­ing him to a whole new gen­er­a­tion of kids. Because, unlike most children’s films of the post-Shrek move­ment, this sto­ry real­ly is one tai­lored for a bumper-seat audience.

Weav­ing sev­en clas­sic AA Milne sto­ries into one fea­ture-length yarn, the film piv­ots around Eeyore’s miss­ing tail. With a pot of hon­ey as the reward for the best make-shift replace­ment, Pooh and friends try every­thing – from an umbrel­la to a cuck­oo clock – to pin the tail back on the don­key. Mean­while, the not-so-wise Owl mis­reads a mis­spelt ​‘back soon’ mes­sage left by Christo­pher Robin, send­ing the gang on a wild-goose chase for a crea­ture called a ​‘Back­son’.

Stay­ing faith­ful to EH Shepherd’s orig­i­nal water­colour draw­ings, direc­tors Stephen Ander­son and Don Hall have rean­i­mat­ed Pooh with a bit more gloss, but not too much glit­ter. From Rabbit’s car­rot patch to the ubiq­ui­tous float­ing red bal­loon, the film is sure to evoke a sense of nos­tal­gia in big­ger kids and adults too.

Even the more ​‘mod­ern’ sequences stay true to char­ac­ter; as in the cabaret song, ​‘Every­thing is Hon­ey’, we see Pooh dressed in a bee-striped swim suit and a boater hat and div­ing into a bot­tom­less land­scape of his favourite gold­en nectar.

Helped along by John Cleese as nar­ra­tor, the whim­si­cal – quin­tes­sen­tial­ly British –film also allows its char­ac­ters to inter­act with the sto­ry itself: get­ting tan­gled in its lines and bounc­ing off the punc­tu­a­tion marks on the page.

After all, after spend­ing 85 years not grow­ing up in the Hun­dred Acre Wood, it would be implau­si­ble to expect Pooh to be brought back to life any­where oth­er than from the heart of the storybook.