Christopher Robin (2018)

Considering Disney's recent propensity for live action adaptations of its animated properties, and given the historic success of the Winnie the Pooh franchise for the company, a film like Christopher Robin was perhaps inevitable. They had a clever enough spin to explore as well by featuring a grown up Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor, giving the part a reasonable go) and taking the classic characters out of The Hundred Acer Wood and into mid century London.

The film starts with a young Christopher's "going away party" with his animal friends before heading off to boarding school at around the age of 10 or so. This farewell is followed by a well done montage of the ensuing years in Christopher's life. Shortly after going off to boarding school his father dies, he continues school, then presumably college, starts a career, meets a girl (Hayley Atwell), marries her, must leave his pregnant wife to serve in World War II, comes home to his wife and a four year old daughter he's never meet, and then resumes his career.

The main body of the story picks up around 1952, his daughter (who we see turning three in 1944) is now around 11 and played by Bronte Carmichael. Christopher is working as an efficiency expert at a luggage manufacturer in London, he is under a lot of stress and is trying to find ways to cut cost sufficiently to save that company at a time when luggage sales have apparently fallen off. His task is important, he is trying to save peoples jobs, but this also means missing a weekend at his childhood home with his wife and daughter to stay in the city and work. This perhaps is what triggers his breakdown.

Christopher is visited by Pooh in a park outside his townhouse, debates his own sanity for a bit, and then must take the silly old bear back to Sussex and The Wood to find his missing friends. After reuniting his childhood gang and saving them from the imagined menace of heffalumps and woozles, Christopher then must rush back to London, only without his knowledge Tigger had mislaid some important papers, so then its up to Pooh, the gang, and daughter Madeline to speed them back to London and save the day.

This is that standard story of 'father works too much and must remember what its like to be a kid again' a favored Disney trope the most prominent example of which is probably Mary Poppins. Though the tale is rendered with some ambiguity and childlike sense of wonder, it is also the story of a man who experiences a psychotic break, and takes his family with him down the rabbit hole, in more ways then one. Or at least that's one explanation, otherwise I suppose Christopher could have spent his formative years with 6 mobile talking stuffed animals and similarly communicative, and apparently ageless, rabbit and owl. Or you could save yourself the trouble and not think about it too hard.

It's a sweet enough film, watchable, and very devoted to its source material. Thankfully things never get too manic, Pooh and company should maintain a certain English decorum associated with the time and place of their creation, and not be making pop culture references, I don't think I could have stood that. I didn't like this movie as much as I'd wanted to, but I could appreciate it, restrained, good hearted, forgivably simplistic. Also on some level Brad Garrett's voicing of Eeyore feels like what his entire life has been building towards. **1/2