FILM REVIEW; You're Only Happy With Your Own Kind? Oh, Pooh (original) (raw)
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FILM REVIEW
The Tigger Movie
Directed by Jun Falkenstein
Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, Musical
G
1h 17m
- Feb. 11, 2000
See the article in its original context from
February 11, 2000
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Section E, Page
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In 1966 Walt Disney produced a short animated film, a featurette in company parlance, called ''Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree,'' adapted from A. A. Milne's beloved children's book. Three more installments followed, and in 1977 Disney released ''The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,'' which may be among the most frequently watched videos in a great many American households. I know it is in mine.
In its zeal to capitalize on the enormous popularity of Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the rest, Disney has since knocked out, in addition to several million plush toys, plastic figurines and (I'm not kidding) Hanukkah menorahs, a number of straight-to-video features starring the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood. These tend to depart radically from both the spirit and the letter of Milne's books, and they range in quality from unbearable to adequate. The animation is, by Disney standards, crude and unimaginative, the songs banal and the stories maudlin and chaotic.
''The Tigger Movie,'' the first Pooh adventure to be released theatrically in 17 years, falls on the high end of the scale. It is an adequate piece of children's entertainment, though it seems better suited for home viewing -- while parents can cook dinner, read the paper or balance the checkbook -- than for the big screen.
Happily, the animation is competent. And in two musical sequences -- one involving sleepy dancing bees, the other a phantasmagoria of history's greatest tiggers -- it is downright inspired. The characters wriggle charmingly, and the scenery beautifully replicates watercolor illustrations in children's books. Milne's books, while they don't serve as source material, are cannily evoked by John Hurt's very English narration. And from time to time, Tigger and friends caper across handsomely typeset pages, reminding us we are in storybook land.
If only the story were better. Milne was working in the great tradition of English nonsense, and his characters are studies in post-Edwardian eccentricity. But in the imagination of Jun Falkenstein, who wrote and directed ''The Tigger Movie,'' each one is reduced to a single trait: Rabbit is a compulsive scold, Owl is a windbag, Piglet is a worrywart, and so on. Pooh himself seems unusually vague and depressed, perhaps because Tigger has sucked up all the film's comic and dramatic oxygen.
But it is, after all, Tigger's movie. You may recall (and if you don't, Roo will helpfully remind you) that to Tigger, the most wonderful thing about tiggers was that he was the only one. Now, for reasons that will be hard to explain to young viewers (in part because they don't make much sense), he is desperate to find others of his kind.
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