Christopher Robin is a 2018 adventure film about a working-class family man who encounters his childhood friend Winnie-the-Pooh, who helps him to rediscover the joys of life.
While the current trend to turn childhood classic animated films into CGI live-action features seems like a somewhat natural evolution to the whole process, I am not entirely in its corner. Like many, I imagine, there is a purity to the hand-drawn animation art-form that makes falling into these pretend worlds all the more open to one’s imagination. Still, in the right hands, good thing may come. Disney’s latest Christopher Robin clings mostly to the warmth of the A.A. Milne children’s stories, but makes a leap to adulthood and thus, all the baggage with it, somehow weakening its charms, anchoring itself to the movieland belief that it’s our long beloved youth that keeps us balanced. It’s not a bad movie, with some good voice work and another solid turn from its star, but it’s not like any Pooh story you’ve ever seen, lacking the joy such things seem always easy to produce.
Beginning in flashback to the days when Christopher Robin (Orton O’Brien) plays in the woods with his favorite stuffed animals, it quickly pushes forward as he must abandon it all, sent to a tough boarding school and then later to battle in World War I, all of which suppresses his imagination. Now an adult (Ewan McGregor), he is an exec at a luggage factory, married to Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and with a daughter, Madeline (Bronte Carmichael). Being a workaholic, that marriage is in trouble and he is thinking of sending Madeline to a boarding school as well, his perfuctory fatherhood a product of his dismal life since leaving the Hundred Acre Woods. However, what he doesn’t realize is that back there, his friends remained, accepting that he is gone until one day Winnie-the-Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings) unexpectedly shows up in London, and thus begins Robin’s adventures to bring him back and in the process to reunite the whole gang … and much more.
Directed by Marc Forster, who’s no stranger to fantasy, with Finding Neverland and the excellent Stranger Than Fiction under his belt, he’s also behind World War Z and Quantum of Solace. With Christopher Robin, he sticks to the dark, the film truly more geared towards adults who grew up on the famed honey-loving bear than bringing in new children to the lot. Nostalgia is running rampant in Hollywood and so it sort of makes sense that a revisit with Pooh is in order, yet this is a strange turn to make, the cynicism of living grown up not quite a good fit with the wonder of being a child.
Either way, I wasn’t entirely troubled by the real-life look of a CGI Pooh, who is the best thing going in the movie, even if being three-dimensional opens up all sorts of new opportunities for mischief. Pooh is on a mission for himself, having found Hundred Acre Wood empty of his friends Tigger (Cummings), Eeyore (an excellent Brad Garrett), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo), and Roo (Sara Sheen), needing Christopher Robin to find them. This leaves Robin bounding about with a living stuffed bear that he desperately tries to hide from shocked onlookers. Admittedly, there are some funny moments, mostly as Pooh manages to keep his wits about him in the bustling city and beyond.
The best moments come in fact when we return to the Hundred Acre Wood, even if the commitment to realism sort of dampens the colorful aura of splendor the animated films capture so well. The plot hinges on Robin being burdened with having to do a terribly adult thing and the story, set over a long weekend, has him struggling to find a way to do so, running parallel with Pooh’s need to locate the gang. This of course makes this Winnie-the-Pooh story heavier than any before, and parents should probably know that this is a film for adults, even as it longs for youth.
I appreciate Disney’s efforts here as modern movies continue to try and find their way between fantasy and gritty realism. I can’t deny that I find myself, like many now grown up, looking back often as well, yet Christopher Robin doesn’t journey us there with much delight, the sorrowful tone and uninspired take a little too on the nose for those no longer playing with toys and out of reach for those still doing so.