Ballymoney Chronicle - Features - Winnie the Pooh

Features

Winnie the Pooh – A Firm Family Favourite

Tuesday, 15 March 2011

This Easter, Walt Disney Animation Studios is releasing a new brand new Winnie the Pooh movie. A full length feature film starring the lovable golden bear, "Winnie the Pooh" marks a return of the classic storybook characters first seen in the 1977 "Many Adventure of Winnie the Pooh". Completely developed using hand-drawn 2D animation and narrated by none other than British actor John Clease, Disney is taking Winnie the Pooh back to its roots.

The Winnie the Pooh stories were originally based on the favourite soft toys of Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A A Milne, and the eventual human star of the stories. Milne would tell his son bedtime stories which he eventually put down on paper and which were serialised within the London newspaper "The Evening News". "Winnie-the-Pooh" the collection of short stories was published in the US in 1926 and was illustrated by the iconic E H Shepherd.

In 1961, The Walt Disney Company bought the rights to Winnie the Pooh and a brand new Disney character was born in the movie "The Many Adventure of Winnie the Pooh". This was soon followed by a number of TV series' including the Disney Channel 3D-like animation series "My Friends Tigger and Pooh" and three spin-off movies "The Tigger Movie" (2000), "Piglet's Big Movie" (2003) and "Pooh's Heffalump Movie" (2005). Now one of the biggest and best loved characters of the Disney family, Winnie the Pooh product lines cover every item you can think of from Winnie the Pooh DVDs, to t-shirts, mugs, soft toys, games, food lines and much much more.

After a long wait since the original Pooh movie, Winnie the Pooh fans are eagerly awaiting the release of the new movie. The new "Winnie the Pooh" film is based on three short Pooh stories "In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail" "In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day," and "In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expedition to the North Pole" however for the first time these stories will be woven into a single story. The new movie features all the 100 acre wood characters Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, Piglet, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, Roo and of course Christopher Robin and all are up to their usual tricks!

As usual Pooh has a very rumbly tumbly and sets to off find some hunny, Eeyore manages to lose his tail again, Tigger is bouncing around the woods looking for "suspicerous villy-uns" and all the animals of 100 acre wood go on an adventure to rescue Christopher Robin.

The hand-drawn animation really gives this film a feeling, as far as the trailer shows, of nostalgia and the beautiful colours within the "hunny-world" sequences really show the quality of the movie. Disney seems to have pulled out all of the stops with this new movie, firmly solidifying Winnie the Pooh as a true family favourite. Children will love the story and the characters and a remembered childhood will draw in adults of all generations.

"Winnie the Pooh" in released in UK cinemas on 15th April 2011