This review originally published at Filmwell, a blog of The Other Journal.
Oh Simple Thing
Dir. Stephen J. Anderson, Don Hall
2011
The advertising campaign for Disney's new Winnie the Pooh film is genius. I am convinced it was devised by a pack of hip interns-- who else would think it was a good idea to use the melancholy soft-rock of Keane in a trailer for a children's film? But as the chords of "Somewhere Only We Know" start to pound over the image of Pooh and Friends marching across a bridge, it hits you right in the gut-- or at least it's supposed to. "Admit it," we are beckoned by the television spots (in Helvetica, no less!). "You miss them." Oh, how you know us, hip Disney interns! Winnie the Pooh knows it will not be able to grab today's ADHD children in a twenty second commercial, with its soft coloring and mild manners. No, instead it aims upward, at literate young parents desperate to instill a sense of taste in their children, children buffeted every day by the frenzied snark of sugar cereal ads. "Oh simple thing, where have you gone," goes the song, played over glimpses of the Hundred Acre Wood. "I'm getting old and I need something to rely on."
While this Winnie the Pooh seems to be something of a "reboot" of the series, it's not as if the bear has been on hiatus. We may associate Pooh's pop culture presence with the Disney films of the sixties and seventies, but he has also had a syndicated series through the nineties, several theatrical and DVD releases in the last decade, and untold volumes of merchandise hawked in Disney's parks. Pooh, as an idea, never really went away. But as the franchise edged closer to irrelevance, it seemed to get more desperate-- the characters became ever more bright and plastic, culminating in the sacrilege of a computer-animated series on Playhouse Disney made to ape the likes of "Dora the Explorer." In this light, Winnie the Pooh functions as a reclaiming of the series, a decided stand against the hyper devolution of children's entertainment.
Continued at Filmwell...
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