Cartoon Corner- The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

This is composed of three shorts made over the course of several years, which is easy to tell if you’re on the lookout for it (the animation quality and character models visibly change between the segments), but I think the in-between material adds a lot to the experience, so we’ll cover this as one movie.



Oddly though the animation style is what sticks out to me.  You can see a lot of the scratch lines and other penciling artifacts, which to some degree gives you a date for the thing, the mid-60s after the switch to Xerox for 101 Dalmatians.  But even then there’s something fuzzy and artificial about it in Pooh… which makes perfect sense.  These are stuffed animals being animated, with imperfections and seams coming apart.  Whether it was a cost-saving measure or not, the slightly washed out and rough look of the animation here actually goes nicely with the conceit that it’s the pages of a storybook coming to life.  Hell, the narration and use of actual book pages along with that is why this works as a movie rather than having artificial stitched-together-shorts vibes, the characters are living a story alongside us, the viewer.

I guess that means in a way Winnie the Pooh was Toy Story before Toy Story.
Maybe that’s why I’m otherwise kinda lukewarm on it.

No mistake, this is a cute movie with its own charm, but I dunno, there’s just not much emotional weight here.  The comedy relies a lot on the simple-mindedness of the characters which would work better if that wasn’t the case for almost all of them.  And since it’s mostly harmless misadventures, comedy is definitely at the forefront of what’s going on here.

The characters do take on a life of their own out in the broader culture for a reason though.  Their childish thinking is a bit samey for comedy, but beyond that their individual quirks do leave an impact, it just doesn’t really show in a narrative flow sense.

Honestly though the best part of the film (aside from the animation stuff, which I could probably go on about some of the visual gags here, like the bees or the bit where the book gets rained out) is probably the ending bit, where Pooh tries to get the Narrator to tell it again.  Like I said, the conceit of being a story the audience is participating in with the characters really elevates the whole thing.

Rating- 5/10.  Yeah, I think this is more interesting as an academic or historical study than as a film.  Good for your really young kids but only a few highlights for the grownups.