Watching Christopher Robin, Disney’s new take on the Winnie-the-Pooh franchise, I was reminded of Steven Spielberg’s Hook, another film based on a children’s series which asked the audience to imagine a beloved child character as an adult. In both films, adulthood is slandered as soulless, obstructed by employment responsibilities, and more than anything: simply not fun. Both movies use nostalgia and a bevy of familiar characters to entice their protagonists to return to their childish persona, to re-embrace what made them truly happy. Hook utilized particularly charming performances from Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, while Christopher Robin gives us a “live-action” version of Pooh and his friends. The result is a mixed bag of heavy-handed metaphors and an interesting reconstruction of the Pooh universe – the Pooh-niverse, you might say (I’m sorry).
The titular Christopher Robin is played here as a grown man by Scottish actor Ewen McGregor, a tremendously talented actor whose gifts always seem to shine brighter when he’s in movies much more interesting than this. This movie seems to skip over the fact that there was an actual Christopher Robin Milne, the son of Winnie-the-Pooh creator A.A. Milne, and instead McGregor’s character simply drops the Milne and becomes Mr. Robin. Robin’s father is presumably killed off in a first-act boyhood montage (unlike the actual Milne who died when his son was thirty-five), thus establishing Pooh and the gang as total figments of Christopher Robin’s imagination. (Though it should be clear that the film’s script is never specific about any of this, and puts the burden on the audience to put these pieces together.) And so, we are dealing with Christopher Robin as a purely fictional creation, living in a world without Pooh as a literary figure.
A veteran of the Second World War, Christopher Robin returns home to his wife, Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and his daughter, Madeline (Bronte Carmichael). He works as the Efficiency Manager at a London luggage factory run by Giles Winslow (Mark Gattis), a feckless rich boy who happens to be the son of the head of Winslow Enterprises. Giles informs Christopher Robin that he must cut Winslow Luggage’s costs by 20%, by any means necessary, most likely by relieving staff. Christopher Robin is given only the weekend to come up with a plan to rescue the workers, which conflicts with Evelyn’s plans to take a trip to a cabin in Sussex. As is so often the case, Evelyn and Madeline are disappointed at Christopher Robin’s absence, while he himself is left to work. Madeline, herself, is left to study frequently in order to gain acceptance into a well-renowned boarding school that she’s hardly interested in attending, more interested in spending time with the father she hardly sees.
Christopher Robin‘s screenplay – which is an interesting cross-section of the sardonic Alex Ross Perry, Oscar-winner Tom McCarthy and Hidden Figures writer Alison Schroeder – has a lot to build in its first act, considering it is reframing everything that we know about Christopher Robin as a person, both fictional and not. After the opening montage, there is a lot of exhibition in London involving Christopher Robin and his being tugged between work and family. It takes a short while before we actually arrive at the star of the film: Pooh himself. Why Pooh materializes in Christopher Robin’s life again is another thing left mostly unexplained, considering this can’t be his first crisis of faith, but materialize he does. On a park bench outside his London home, he sees the talking stuffed bear ready to greet him, and Christopher Robin could not be more surprised.
The character of Winnie-the-Pooh, the dim but well-meaning teddy bear who loves his friends nearly as much as he loves eating honey, is one of the seminal children’s characters of the last 100 years. Voiced by Jim Cummings (who also does the voice of Tigger), his scratchy drawl hums meekly, looking for his friends and looking for honey to fill his rumbling tummy. Pooh hopes that seeing Christopher Robin will help him find his friends, who seemed to have vanished from their home in the Hundred Acre Wood, but what Pooh finds is not the young boy who left them so long ago, but a man who must find a way to rid himself of Pooh so he can get on with his work. After a humorous sequence where Christopher Robin must traverse through the busy streets of London with a talking stuffed bear, he ends up back in the Hundred Acre Wood for the first time since his childhood.
There, he finds the rest of the gang Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo), Roo (Sara Sheen), Owl (Toby Jones), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Eeyore (Brad Garrett) and, of course, Tigger. It is here that Christopher Robin must learn to embrace his pre-war childishness, not only to help Pooh but to help himself return to being the person who was not hounded by work and other adult responsibilities. Again, like Hook, Christopher Robin posits that being more of a kid helps you to be a better adult and it becomes the kind of film where children learn about adults, and vice-versa, with the help of anthropomorphized characters. It is the sequences with Pooh and the rest of the characters that are really Robin‘s finer moments.
Like many children, Winnie-the-Pooh was a major part of a large rotation of characters I watched in school and at home. His child-like view of the world (and his persistent hunger for sweets) is remarkably relatable to children, while still affably charming to adults. Christopher Robin threatens to drown in its sentimentality on occasion, but overall its scenes with Pooh are a splendid reminder as to just how delightful that character is, with his simplified wisdom and his direct declarations. The movie is directed by Marc Forster, a filmmaker who can sometimes confuse easy triggers with profound emotion, and there’s some of that here – saying this movie’s symbolism is ‘on the nose’ is an incredible understatement – but I’ll admit that my own nostalgia grasped me for large sections of Christopher Robin, and I was made to smile by that silly old bear.
Directed by Marc Forster