Christopher Robin

One of the most interesting, though least effective, live-action adaptations of classic Disney fare is this sequel(?) to Disney’s animated classic The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977). Rather than update the A.A. Milne characters as incarnated by Disney animators and voice actors, Christopher Robin centres on the one human in those stories, Milne’s son—played here by Ewan McGregor. The movie starts out where both Milne’s books and the original Disney film end, with Christopher Robin facing the fact that he must grow up and leave behind the imaginary friends of his childhood. The scene where the boy explains all of this to his stuffed bear Pooh is heartbreakingly powerful in the final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner (1928). It is a bit less moving in the ’77 Disney movie, and criminally rote at the start of this picture. 

After the prologue, the new movie jumps forward in time and we meet Christopher Robin as an adult. In this way, the film plays like a cross between the contemporary trend of TV shows rebooting themselves with their original casts thirty years later, and Hook—Steven Spielberg’s 1991 live-action fantasy about Peter Pan as a grown-up yuppie undergoing a mid-life crisis. In Christopher Robin, the titular character is an overworked cooperate drone who neglects his family and has lost all connection to his childhood. But fortunately, Pooh and his friends find a way to leave the enchanted Hundred Acre Wood and enter the real world of Post-WWII London.

Unlike Disney’s recent live-action remakes of their classic catalogue—Maleficent, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King (an endless list is in the pipeline)—this is an original script penned by a most unlikely trio of screenwriters: Alex Ross Perry (the prolific New York indie filmmaker behind The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip, and Queen of Earth), Tom McCarthy (the Oscar-winning writer/director of The Station Agent, The Visitor, and Spotlight), and Allison Schroeder (the Oscar-nominated co-screenwriter of Hidden Figures). All of the actors who voiced the original Disney pictures are long dead, but Jim Cummings, who plays both Pooh and Tigger, does such an amazing impression of Sterling Holloway and Paul Winchell it is impossible to tell the difference. Brad Garret, as Eeyore the old grey donkey, manages almost as perfect a recreation of Ralph Wright,. But the other animated characters—voiced by Nick Mohammed as Piglet, Peter Capaldi as Rabbit, Sophie Okonedo as Kanga, and Toby Jones as Owl—sound nothing like the original voices, making for an awkward mishmash that plays as neither true to the classic voices nor like a fresh interpretation.

Worse, the animated stuffed animal characters of the Hundred Acre Wood don’t come off as truly “alive” in this picture. No longer 2D cartoons, they are rendered here as photorealistic living stuffed animals—rendered to look like the E. H. Shepard illustrations in Milne’s book, not the Disney animated incarnations. The CGI is good, in that they look real, but they are written as if suspended in amber. This is in part appropriate because, while life has continued for them even though Christopher Robin is long gone, they serve no real purpose without him. But there is also a strange “uncanny valley” quality to these animated characters, which, I think, has a lot to do with the writing and the voice talent. Cummings has been playing Winnie The Pooh and Tigger for Disney since 1988, but in this movie, he seems to simply repeat their famous catch-phrases (with flawless reproduction) without the lines feeling connected to the action on screen. There are many utterances in this movie that feel intended to instantly strike a chord of familiarity rather than to serve a narrative or character function. And so much of the focus is placed on Pooh and Tigger (the two who sound "accurate") that the other stuffed animal friends get lost. 

Christopher Robin also suffers from a tedious kids-movie structure wherein it is clear from the get-go exactly where the story is going, forcing adult viewers to sit and wait for the main character to figure out what we already know. Little distracts us from this tedium and, charming as McGregor is, his Christopher Robin isn’t very engaging.

But perhaps the fatal flaw in this picture lies in the casting of Orton O'Brien as the young Christopher Robin in the movie’s prologue. I don’t want to pick on a little kid, but we are currently living through a renaissance of amazing juvenile performances. Films like Little Miss Sunshine, Whale Rider, The Squid and the Whale, Birth, The Hunt, Kick-Ass, Boyhood, Mud, Wadjda, Moonrise Kingdom, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Room, Theeb, Beasts of No Nation, Lion, The Florida Project, Capharnaüm, and more have demonstrated the power of truly gifted child performers in collaboration with directors who know how to capture their honesty on screen. So for Disney and director Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) to cast the type of child-actor we use to see all too frequently on TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s – a cute but stiff performer who delivers his lines articulately but with ZERO connection to the words he’s saying; who might as well be talking about a box of cereal rather than living through the biggest emotional moment of his young life—it’s difficult to care very much for the man this kid grows up to be.

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Kudos to Disney for trying something different with this latest live-action rehash of one of their classic titles, but this wobbly concoction of nostalgia, familiarity, and cliché lacks any real imagination.