Winnie the Pooh (2011 film)

Winnie the Pooh is a 2011 American animated musical comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures under Walt Disney Pictures. It is based on the book series of the same name written by A. A. Milne and illustrated by E. H. Shepard. The film is a revival of Disney's Winnie the Pooh franchise, the fifth theatrical Winnie the Pooh film released (either animated and overall), and the second in the Disney Animated Canon. It was directed by Stephen Anderson and Don Hall and produced by Peter Del Vecho and Clark Spencer, based on a story that Anderson and Hall conceived with Clio Chiang, Don Dougherty, Kendelle Hoyer, Brian Kesinger, Nicole Mitchell, and Jeremy Spears. Jim Cummings reprises his voice roles as Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, and Travis Oates reprises his voice role as Piglet, while newcomers Tom Kenny, Craig Ferguson, Bud Luckey, and Kristen Anderson-Lopez provide the voices of Rabbit, Owl, Eeyore, and Kanga, respectively. In the film, which is narrated by John Cleese, the aforementioned residents of the Hundred Acre Wood embark on a quest to save Christopher Robin from an imaginary culprit while Pooh deals with a hunger for honey.
Production began in September 2008 with Disney Animation's chief creative officer John Lasseter announcing that Disney wanted to create a film that would "transcend generations". The film was planned to feature five stories from the A. A. Milne books, before the final cut ended up drawing inspiration from three stories. The film features six songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez and a score composed by Henry Jackman, as well as a rendition of the Sherman Brothers' "Winnie the Pooh" theme song by actress and musician Zooey Deschanel. The film is the first sequel produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios in twelve years since Fantasia 2000 (1999).
Winnie the Pooh premiered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building on the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California on July 10, 2011, and was released in the United States on July 15. The film grossed $50.1 million on a $30 million budget and received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its evocations of nostalgia but criticized its short runtime. Currently, it serves as Disney Animation's most recent traditionally animated theatrical feature film.
The film's setting takes place inside a book, which tells about the adventures of Christopher Robin and his friends Winnie the Pooh (Pooh for short), Piglet, Rabbit, Eeyore, Tigger, Owl, Kanga, and Roo, who all live in the Hundred Acre Wood.
One morning, Pooh discovers that he has run out of honey. While searching for more, he visits Eeyore and notices that Eeyore's tail has gone missing. A contest is later held, offering a pot of honey as a prize for any participant who can find a suitable replacement tail for Eeyore, but every attempt fails.
Later, Pooh arrives at Christopher Robin's house to ask for honey, but he finds Christopher gone, and a note left behind. Pooh asks Owl to read the note, but Owl's poor reading comprehension skills cause him to believe the letter says Christopher Robin has been kidnapped by a monster called the "Backson". Owl tells the others, and Rabbit comes up with a plan to trap the creature by leaving a trail of items leading to a pit.
Elsewhere, Tigger decides to hunt down and attack the Backson on his own. He soon finds Eeyore, who has accidentally been left behind by the gang, and decides to take the donkey under his wing. While training Eeyore, Tigger dresses up as the Backson to teach Eeyore how to fight, but the training is cut short when Eeyore sneaks away.
While struggling to follow through with Rabbit's plan, Pooh falls into the Backson pit after finding an empty honey pot above it. After Rabbit's party discovers this, they reunite with Eeyore, who has found an anchor for a replacement tail while hiding from Tigger. Rabbit tries to use the anchor to free Pooh, but its weight pulls everyone but Piglet into the pit. Piglet heads towards Christopher Robin's house to find a rope to rescue everyone, but he gets frightened off after spotting Tigger in his Backson costume. A comical chase ends with both of them getting trapped in the pit along with letters from the book's text, which Pooh uses to build a ladder for everyone to climb out. Afterwards, the group reunites with Christopher Robin, who explains that the real reason for his disappearance was that he was at school; the others had misread the letter saying that he had gone out and would be "back soon".
Still hungry, Pooh continues his search for honey. He soon visits Owl's house, where he discovers that Owl has been using Eeyore's tail as a bell pull, unaware of who it belonged to. As Pooh leaves to return Eeyore's tail, Owl offers him to stay for some honey, but Pooh, ignoring his hunger, declines, and returns the tail to Eeyore. As a reward for this act of selflessness, everyone in the Hundred Acre Wood declares Pooh the winner of the contest and presents him with a giant honey pot, much to his delight.
In a post-credits scene, a real Backson, who is revealed to be a very nice and gentle creature, discovers the trail of items that Pooh and his friends left and ends up falling into their pit.
Walt Disney Animation Studios' chief creative officer John Lasseter first approached Stephen Anderson and Don Hall in November 2008 about making a new Winnie the Pooh film for theaters, with the two becoming enthusiastic at the idea and accepting the project. In 2009, Lasseter, Anderson and Hall viewed the classic Winnie the Pooh feature shorts and films to figure out how to make the title character culturally relevant.
Following a trip to Ashdown Forest in Sussex, South East England to explore the location of A. A. Milne's original stories, the filmmakers enlisted Burny Mattinson, a Disney veteran who worked as the key animator on the 1974 short Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, to serve as lead storyboard artist for the film, with Anderson and Hall directing. After seeing all the feature films about Winnie the Pooh, Mattinson thought he could use Milne's story "In which Eeyore loses his tail and Pooh finds one" as the basic idea for the plot. Mattinson's five-minute pitch for the sequence where Eeyore loses his tail is credited with convincing Disney executives to make the film a feature-length work instead of a featurette. Regarding the decision to use hand-drawn (traditional) animation in lieu of computer-generated imagery (CGI), Anderson stated that "If this were a fully CG-animated [sic] and rendered and lit Pooh, it just wouldn’t feel right. We would be doing the characters a real disservice." Many of the animation staff from The Princess and the Frog (2009) were brought in to work on Winnie the Pooh, as the two films involved traditional animation, and additional clean up/inbetween animation and digital ink and paint was provided by Yowza Animation, Inc. The production would also use the same software utilized for Princess and the Frog, Toon Boom Animation's Harmony, to digitally ink and paint the drawings.
Originally, the film was supposed to feature five stories from the A. A. Milne books, but the final cut ended up drawing inspiration from three stories. Lasseter had also announced that Rabbit's friends and relatives would be in the film, but their scene was ultimately deleted. In an interview with ABC 4, Ken Sansom was asked about voicing Rabbit in the film, he stated, "I'm not sure." He was replaced by Tom Kenny, although Sansom claimed he was still under contract.
The film was released on April 6, 2011 in Belgium; April 11 in Germany; and on April 15 in the United Kingdom. It was released on July 15, 2011, in the United States.
The film was preceded by the animated short The Ballad of Nessie, which tells the story of how the Loch Ness Monster and her best friend MacQuack (a rubber duck) came to live in the loch they now call home. In some international screenings, the episode "Cubby's Goldfish" from the Disney Junior series Jake and the Never Land Pirates was aired instead.
The film was first released as number 51 in the Animated Classics range on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download on October 25, 2011. The releases included animated shorts The Ballad of Nessie and Mini Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: "Pooh's Balloon," as well as deleted scenes.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of 133 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "Short, nostalgic, and gently whimsical, Winnie the Pooh offers young audiences—and their parents—a sweetly traditional family treat." According to Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 74 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". CinemaScore polls reported that the average grade moviegoers gave the film an "A−" on an A+ to F scale.
Gary Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times says the film "proves a fitting tribute to one of the last century's most enduring children's tales." A. O. Scott of The New York Times praised the film for being able to charm children and parents alike. Roger Ebert, giving it 3 stars out of 4, wrote in his review, "In a time of shock-value 3-D animation and special effects, the look of the film is gentle and pleasing. It was hand-animated, I'm told, and the backgrounds use a subtle and reassuring watercolor style. It's a nightmare-proof experience for even the youngest viewers."
While Platform Online stated that Winnie the Pooh's "hand-drawn animation is such a welcome relief," it found the film's run-time length to be more of an issue, which it stated "At just 70 minutes, even aiming at kids this could have been longer – Pixar have been pushing films well over 90 minutes for years now, and it's clear the children can handle it. Just as you really get into the film it's over, and you're left wanting more."
In North America, Winnie the Pooh earned $7.8 million in its opening weekend from 2,405 single-screen locations, averaging about $3,267 per venue, and ranking sixth for the weekend. The film closed on September 22, 2011, with a final domestic gross of $26.7 million, with the opening weekend making up 29.44% of the final gross. Among its overseas grosses, Winnie the Pooh had its largest gross in Japan with $4.13 million; the country has had a long-standing affection for the character of Winnie the Pooh. Other international grosses include $1.33 million in Germany, $1.29 million in Poland, $1.18 million in the UK and $1.14 million in Russia. Overall, it made $23.4 million overseas, bringing the worldwide gross to $50.1 million over a budget of $30 million.
In order to search for song-writers, Anderson and Hall sent visuals to five songwriting teams, and the team liked the demos returned by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, eventually backing them on board. The Lopezes' previously worked with John Lasseter and Disney music executive Chris Montan on the theme park musical version of Finding Nemo. They wrote seven tracks for Winnie the Pooh. Zooey Deschanel performed three songs for the film, including a take on the Winnie the Pooh theme song, "A Very Important Thing to Do" and an original end-credit song "So Long", which was written by Deschanel and performed with She & Him bandmate M. Ward. The film was scored by Henry Jackman, with additional music by Christopher Willis. The soundtrack was released on July 12, 2011.
The Walt Disney Company released five versions for the song "Welcome to my world" featuring Edyta Bartosiewicz for the Polish version, Witaj w moim świecie (Welcome to my world), Anca Sigartău for the Romanian version, Bun Venit în Lumea mea (Welcome to My World), Zséda for the Hungarian version, Az én világom (My world), Evgenia Vlasova for the Ukrainian version, Мій світ (My world), and Beloslava for the Bulgarian version, Добре дошъл в моя свят (Dobre doshŭl v moya svyat).
A musical theatre adaptation, titled Disney's Winnie the Pooh KIDS, uses additional music from Will Van Dyke and additional lyrics and scenes by Cheryl Davies.