“I can see you’re going to be awfully feisty today,” says Winnie the Pooh to his tummy who’s letting him know with loud rumbles that it wants honey in the animated feature film Winnie the Pooh. Disney has brought back to the big screen all the characters of the Hundred Acre Wood for a brand new adventure that finds Winnie the Pooh searching for some nice honey to settle his hungry stomach.
Pooh (voiced wonderfully by Jim Cummings) is having no luck getting any honey from his friends who seem to have a different problem. Eeyore has gone and lost his tail and is feeling very blue about it. So the entire gang – Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, Kanga, Roo, and Piglet – decides to have a contest to solve Eeyore’s problem. Whoever comes up with a replacement tail for their donkey friend will win a big pot of rich, sticky, gooey honey.
Pooh and his friends are not long into the contest when Owl comes across a note from their good friend Christopher Robin. (For anyone who doesn’t know, all the characters in the Hundred Acre Wood are from the imagination and playroom of the boy.) Owl gets the note wrong and convinces all his friends that Christopher Robin has been taken by a creature called “The Backson.” So the search for Eeyore’s tail and honey for Pooh must once again wait in order for the gang to go rescue their friend.
Winnie the Pooh is a charming and sweet animated adventure that takes the characters and the audience back to the days of storybook tales. The simplicity of both the animation and the problems of the characters is refreshing, endearing, and wonderful. The entire voice cast does a fantastic job of bringing these characters to life while staying true to how they acted and sounded in the original films of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
In an era of star-powered, loud, 3-D flashy animated films hitting the screen with no real moral compass or genuine plot, Disney’s Winnie the Pooh brings back to the big screen the gentle, warm, and innocent characters who remind us of the importance of imagination, friendship, selflessness, and play. Make sure to take a trip this summer to the Hundred Acre Wood and have some old-fashioned fun with a silly nilly old bear.
GRADE: B
Winnie the Pooh hits theaters on July 15, 2011 and is rated G for all audiences.
