Piglet's Big Movie

**Piglet's Big Movie** is a 2003 animated film directed by Francis Glebas and is the third instalment in the Winnie the Pooh franchise. The film premiered on March 16, 2003.

## Plot

Eeyore, Rabbit, Tigger and Pooh are working on a plan to get honey from a beehive by getting the bees to move into a new hive by convincing them that Eeyore is a bee. Piglet arrives and wants to help but is told that he is too small to help. The plan goes awry when the bees see through the plan, but Piglet manages to divert the bees into the new hive and trap them. Unfortunately, Piglet's friends take all the credit for themselves when they fail to notice Piglet's heroism, making him leave dejectedly. After the bees break free, Pooh, Rabbit, Tigger, and Eeyore escape to Piglet's house. When they notice that Piglet is missing, they decide to find him after being joined by Roo. Using Piglet's scrapbook as a guide, the five use the pictures to tell the stories depicted therein, leading to several flashbacks.

The first story told is when Kanga and Roo first moved to the Hundred Acre Wood. Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, and Rabbit are afraid of the newcomers and Rabbit concocts a plan to use Piglet as a decoy so they could ransom Roo to force Kanga to leave. When Kanga finds out about the plan, she plays along by pretending that Piglet is Roo, where Piglet learns of how nice she is. Meanwhile, Roo and Rabbit get along and, realizing how nice they are, everyone agrees to let Kanga and Roo stay.

The second story told is the expedition to find the North Pole, where Piglet uses a long stick to save Roo (who had fallen in the river). His heroism is overlooked when he gives the stick to Pooh to try to catch Roo, who had been catapulted into the air during the rescue (only to be caught by his mother), and Christopher Robin crediting Pooh with finding the North Pole (the stick he is holding). Back in the present, the friends regret not sharing the praise with Piglet.

The third story told is the building of the House at Pooh Corner. Piglet comes up with the idea to build Eeyore a house in an area they named "Pooh Corner" and are joined by Tigger to build it. As Tigger and Pooh build the house after finding some neatly stacked sticks, Piglet struggles to keep up and every attempt to build the house falls apart. Tigger and Pooh go to inform Eeyore of the bad news, leaving Piglet behind. When they find Eeyore, he says that he already built himself a house out of sticks, revealing that the sticks Pooh and Tigger found was his house. Piglet then arrives and leads them back to Eeyore’s newly completed house. Once again, Piglet’s contributions are overlooked as the wind gets the credit for moving Eeyore’s house.

Back in the present, an argument between Rabbit and Tigger ends with the scrapbook falling into a river. Without their guide, the friends return to Piglet's house and, after making drawings of Piglet's heroism, the friends again resolve to find Piglet. During their search, they come across several pages from the scrapbook, which have floated downstream, where they find the book's bindings suspended on a hollow old log looming over a waterfall. Pooh goes to retrieve it but falls into a hole in the log. The others try to rescue him, but they couldn't reach him. At that moment, Piglet arrives and helps pull Pooh to safety just as the log begins to break in half. Eeyore, Rabbit, Roo and Tigger manage to escape, but the front half breaks off. The survivors begin to cry, thinking Piglet and Pooh perished, but they managed to get out in time by jumping into the bottom half of the log and reunite with their friends.

Piglet's friends take him back to his house to show him their new drawings. During a party the next day, Pooh takes Piglet to Eeyore's house, revealing that he changed the sign to read "Pooh and Piglet Corner". When everyone else arrives, Pooh claims that "it's the least [they] could do for a very small Piglet who has done such very big things."

## Cast and Characters

* John Fiedler as Piglet
* Jim Cummings as Winnie the Pooh / Tigger
* Andre Stojka as Owl
* Kath Soucie as Kanga
* Nikita Hopkins as Roo
* Peter Cullen as Eeyore
* Ken Sansom as Rabbit
* Tom Wheatley as Christopher Robin

## Music

American singer-songwriter Carly Simon wrote seven new songs for the film, and performed six of them ("If I Wasn't So Small", "Mother's Intuition", "Sing Ho for the Life of a Bear", "With A Few Good Friends", "The More I Look Inside", and "Comforting to Know"), as well as recording her own version of the Sherman brothers' "Winnie the Pooh" theme song.

"The More It Snows" features Jim Cummings and John Fiedler, as Pooh and Piglet. Simon was accompanied by her children Ben Taylor and Sally Taylor on many of the songs. Renée Fleming accompanied Simon on the song "Comforting to Know". On "Sing Ho for the Life of a Bear" Simon was accompanied by the cast.

The soundtrack also features five tracks of the film's score by Carl Johnson, as well as five of Simon's original demonstration recordings.

## Production

Piglet's Big Movie was produced by Disneytoon Studios, Walt Disney Animation (Japan), Gullwing Co., Ltd, Studio Fuga, and T2 Studio.

## Release

The film is released on VHS and DVD on 29 July 2003. Close captioned by the National Captioning Institute with the new Disney National Captioning Institute Close Captioning first used in Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure.

## Reception

### Critical Response

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a "Certified Fresh" rating of 70% based on 77 reviews, and an average rating of 6.2 out of 10. The site's critical consensus is "Wholesome and charming entertainment for young children." On Metacritic the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on reviews from 23 critics. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade A, on a scale of A+ to F.

Film critic Stephen Holden of New York Times called the film an "oasis of gentleness and wit." Nancy Churnin of The Dallas Morning News stated that Piglet's Big Movie was "one of the nifty pleasures in the process", despite her belief that "Disney may be milking its classics."

### Box Office

Piglet's Big Movie was number seven on the box-office charts on its opening weekend, earning $6 million. The film domestically grossed $23 million, half the amount of what The Tigger Movie earned, and it grossed nearly $63 million worldwide.