Disney 51: Winnie the Pooh

[Betty Elms]

So there's a new Winnie the Pooh movie which apparently not many people saw because WINNIE THE POOH IS FOR BABIES and also because it's less than an hour long. I just got around to seeing it and I'm curious if anyone else here has. You seem like the sort of folk who dig cartoons. Or at least I hope so, since animation is, like, My Thing.

This is a delightful little movie. Also it's postmodern out the ass, even more so than Many Adventures. Not in a snarky intertextual Dreamworks way, but in that classic Pooh way, what with how they play around with the storybook framing device. It's the sort of unconventionality that's great both for being unconventional and for working perfectly with the piece as a whole. It's all in all a rather charming movie, although beyond the metafictional elements it only rarely tops Many Adventures. Which is fine. Many Adventures is one of the all time best Disney films, but it points toward my problem with John Lasseter.

I know the common narrative amongst animation fans is that John Lasseter has come in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end, but I say bullshit. Thus far all he seems to be is a pretty talented man with a knack for quality control, and not much creative ambition. So far he's overseen the production of four films in the Disney animated canon. The first, Bolt, he removed director Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) from for making the project "too quirky for its own good." The second, Princess and the Frog, was a throwback to 1990s Disney. The third, Tangled, was a throwback to 1990s Disney. The fourth, Winnie the Pooh, is a throwback to more Winnie the Pooh.

I've liked almost all of those movies, but I don't look at that and see "creative genius forging a new way for animation." I see somebody who will bring about many good movies, but will make very little artistic progress. He would never have made Fantasia.

(Side note: They butchered Rabbit. I have no idea what zealous, broadly comic, chipper creature skinned Rabbit sometime after 1974 and is now hopping about wearing his pelt, but it's seriously fucked up.)