The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh Reviews

While not entirely a narrative film, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is the first successful film to come out of the Bronze Era. Spliced and edited together, with new wraparound animation and voice work, the film follows the three adventures of Winnie the Pooh and company found in the prior shorts.

It’s a gentle, sweet film, one that leans hard on Disney’s knack for creating character-driven animation, offering up several unique creations. There’s no overarching villain, no grand premise to tie everything together, just the easy-going charm of the A. A. Milne stories.

And for a Disney adaptation, this film translates his work smoothly and more accurately than many of the previous films.   The backgrounds are faithful reproductions of the artwork of E. H. Shepard’s loose, sketchy style.  The large swatches of watercolors combined with the crosshatched detail work make for charming visuals. It frequently feels like a children’s storybook come to life, and that’s not even counting the numerous points during which the film pulls back from the animation to reveal the book they’re occurring in, or the ways in which the narrative and book interact with each other. A flood in the second story finds it bursting out of the drawing and removing large chunks of text, a fun and imaginative bit of creative thinking on the part of the animators there.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh combines 1966’s Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, 1968’s Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, and 1974’s Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. There’s not a weak link there, in my eyes. Granted, the strongest of the bunch is definitely Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, deservedly so, as it manages to focus in on the entirety of the ensemble in a highly satisfying way. Call me crazy, but I’ve never been nuts about the manic Tigger, I’ve always preferred the melancholy of Eeyore, the neurosis of Rabbit, and the pretentious blowhard Owl. The Blustery Day gives each of them a chance to shine.

I’ve knocked Disney’s animation work post-101 Dalmatians for frequently lacking in what made the salad days of the studio so special. Even the variant quality of the Package Years offers up numerous hidden gems if one is willing to look, and the same could be said for Winnie the Pooh.  Sure, Christopher Robin looks more like a quick sketch than a well thought-out character, but everything else is aces.  After Tigger barges into Pooh’s house and tells him of honey thieving creatures, Pooh has an extended nightmare sequence that recalls “Pink Elephants on Parade” for sheer weirdness and imagination. Frankly, Pooh’s also got a small amount of comeuppance coming to him after spending so much of the film greedily stealing honey from his friends and strangers. “Huffalumps and Woozles” is a patented Disney phantasmagoria, something the studio excels at, and probably isn’t as well-known for as they should be. Despite so many safe and sanitized movies, when the Disney artists were allowed to get weird, they got really weird, and the films were all the better for it.

Perhaps The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh turned out so well because they allowed for Milne's voice to carry through. Unlike The Jungle Book which removed the darkness from the stories, or Alice in Wonderland which downplayed the wordplay and much of the wit for spectacle, Winnie the Pooh is quaint, almost quiet, in its aims. Its intentions are much smaller, its scope more narrow, and each of the sections handled with tremendous clarity and economy. There's no sharp tonal changes or contrasts like in so many of the Silver Era films, but a precise charm. It may not have the glossiest images, but there's a big warm heart here. No wonder Disney was able to spin it off into a never-ending franchise.