Christopher Robin: A willy-nilly silly old movie

The latest installment in Disney’s continuing series of turning beloved animated classics into live action adaptations that fall just short of expectation is a sequel to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

The movie opens in the Hundred Acre Wood, home of Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore and the rest of Christopher Robin’s toys-turned-imaginary friends. It is the day before Christopher Robin is leaving for boarding school, so he is there, dressed in a monogrammed smock like an idiot, to tell everyone goodbye.

Piglet gives him acorns so that he will always remember the Wood. Christopher and Pooh have a heart to heart about never forgetting each other. And then the boy is off through the magic door that leads back to the human world.

Side note here to southern parents -- quit dressing your kids in blouses. It doesn’t matter if it is a son or a daughter. This trend that began with Victorian-era British children should have stayed in the Victorian-era.

Whenever I go back to my mom’s house and see a photo of me as a child in a plaid vest with my monogram on it, my first thought is always, “Clearly this woman didn’t love me as much as she claims she did.”

Anyway, we watch Christopher Robin grow up. His dad dies. He goes to war. He has a kid. The whole time Christopher Robin is off killing people and having sex, Winnie the Pooh is watching the door, hoping his best friend will come back to play.

Fast forward to whatever present day is supposed to be in this movie. Christopher Robin (Exan McGregor, who has now lived out two of my childhood dreams -- being Obi Wan Kenobi and being friends with Winnie the Pooh) is an executive at a luggage company, the one struggling arm of London’s most powerful corporation.

He has been ordered to cut costs or have to lay off members of his staff. The conundrum forces him to stay home while his wife (Agent Carter’s Haley Atwell) and daughter go to the family cottage for a weekend in the country.

The door linking the Hundred Acre Wood to our world opens for the first time in years. Pooh realizes that it is a sign. His friend needs him.

And that’s where the recap will stop for now.

I expected to cry a lot going into this movie. My daughter has a stuffed Winnie the Pooh that is 37 years old. It was mine when I was a baby. My mother claims she had to re-buy the VHS of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh because it and Star Wars were the only two movies I would watch until I was about five. These characters have meant a lot to me and now to my kids.

Let me reiterate that, while I figured I would cry, I also figured that Christopher Robin would be a mostly forgettable movie. The reality is that it may not be a classic, but if you grew up watching Disney movies, it gives you a lot to love.

The iconic imagery of Pooh in his thoughtful spot and of Tigger bouncing on his tail are absolutely delightful. The soundtrack is used in the same way that Jon Favreau used the soundtrack to the animated Jungle Book in his 2016 live action adaptation. There are a few songs there, but not every second on screen is a count down to “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers.”

What I liked most about Christopher Robin when I saw it can, unfortunately, not be recreated at every viewing. I had a woman behind me talking back to the screen. So, when Pooh first says, “Doing nothing can lead to the most wonderful something” she said, very loudly, “I know that’s right, Pooh." She also loudly said “Oh S***!” when Christopher Robin calls his human boss a hephalump. It was the greatest!

I don’t know if Disney ever considered turning to Wes Anderson to direct this movie, but I am glad that the company trusted director Marc Forster to create a live action world full of the more classically-designed characters.

It would have been so easy to try to create a splash with Christopher Robin by making the movie a stop-motion affair featuring Jason Schwartzman voicing every character. Instead, what we get is simple and charming, just like the chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff that co-stars in the movie.

No, I am not ashamed that I wrote that.