August 16, 2018 2 min to read

Christopher Robin

A watered-down instalment from the Hundred Acre Woods probably won’t offend anyone, but I doubt it will excite them either.

by Zach Saul

“Seriousness” is a prevalent condition among adults, and one Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) suffers from. Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and company want all those affected to know there’s a cure - silliness, whimsy, and mundanity. Suffering from a stressful work-life, and increasingly distant relationship with his wife and daughter, we find Mr. Robin blowing off his family to work on a budget crisis over the weekend. unbeknownst to him, the stuffed animals from his childhood had other ideas, and pay him a visit to remind him what’s important in life, and track honey all over his London apartment. Pooh inadvertently guilt-trips Mr. Robin into joining him to find the rest of his friends, and eventually battle against a Heffalump.

Pooh is great at giving short soliloquies and give this film charm, and subtly pokes fun at the judgmentalness that Christopher and the overly serious working world has about whimsy. What makes Pooh and the gang so endearing is their willingness to accept whatever reality is presented to them unconditionally and operate within its boundaries. When Pooh is asked to be quiet so Mr. Robin can work, instead of getting defeated he invents a game where he whispers things that he sees to himself. When Piglet finds out Mr.Robin will be eaten for breakfast if he doesn’t get his important papers to the meeting, he interprets Robin’s hyperbole literally and rallies the gang to travel to London. What eventually rescues Christopher Robin from his funk is a reversal of this pattern, in which he’s asked to accept the reality his stuffed animals present him with: that a Heffalump is trying to eat them.

People will buy tickets to Christopher Robin based mostly on nostalgia for A.A. Milne’s books. To his credit, director Marc Forster understands this, and uses the best concepts, phrases, and imagery from the books to his advantage. The strongest scenes in the movie are the dialogue sequences between Robin and Pooh that are more philosophical, and to an extent I wish Forster would have included more of them. In one scene, Robin’s wife Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) tells their daughter Madeline, “it’s hard to imagine your father as a child isn’t it?” and this was a sentiment me and Evelyn shared. Even though the audience is familiar with Christopher Robin, some character development to explain his current emotional state would have been tremendously helpful.

The Good: The character design in Christopher Robin is stunning, and is some of concept artist Michael Kutsche’s best work. Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and the whole gang don’t just look cute, their look feels refined, and retrained in keeping with E. H. Shepard’s original artwork from the books. As a whole Christopher Robin checks the boxes you’d expect from a classic novel adaptation, and is a definitely family-friendly movie.

The Bad: The story lacks nuance and refinement. While pockets of dialogue are well written and interesting, the way Mr. Robin and his family are portrayed is reductive and overly simplistic. The film wasn’t a disappointment as much as it was a watered down product, engineered to be inoffensive.