Winnie the Pooh

A long-awaited return to the hand-drawn form by Walt Disney Animation Studios, Winnie the Pooh is sporadically amusing, even to a sour adult like me. It delivers with the nostalgic warm and fuzzies. Which is what makes it sad that they’ve had their traditional animators hunched like monks over the drawing boards, hard at work reproducing the weakest efforts of the studio in order to deliver a 50-minute-or-so toy commercial. Disney isn’t even trying to hide the evil at this point. And for some reason they needed seven people to come up with this story to fill those 50 minutes: Pooh gets hungry, Eeyore loses his tail and Christopher Robin goes missing while everyone else runs around trying to figure out how to capture a miscommunication. I know this is geared toward toddlers, but you’d think seven people paid to come up with a story might be able to put their collective wits together and actually deliver a narrative. But no bother here. Cinemark 14 and Paradise Cinema 7. Rated G