Silly Old Bear! Christopher Robin 🐻🍯

Like everyone else, I grew up absolutely in love with Pooh bear and it was love at first sight. I think most, if not all, of my clothes as a child were Pooh bear brand and although I'm now fully grown, I still remember my first best friend, which is evident by the fact that I have four Pooh bears, including one that is three feet tall. 

So imagine my excitement when I heard they were making a new, live action movie!!!! 

I'll admit: I was a little unsure how a live action movie would work, but when I heard that Jim Cummings was going to be voicing Pooh and Tigger in the movie (he's the voice actor that's done their voices for a few decades now), I decided to give it a try and waited anxiously for the first trailers to release and once they did, it only made me want to see it even more! 

The basic synopsis from the trailers was that Christopher Robin was now grown and for one reason or another, Pooh and the other animals from the Hundred Acre Wood went to London to find him and help him. It seemed a bit bizarre, but it certainly piqued my interest. 

My work schedule was a bit hectic and so it took me much longer than I would've liked to go see it, and all of the movie theaters being in the two towns over certainly didn't help, but finally, I was able to go and I was more excited than I'd like to admit. 

*spoilers beyond this point*

The movie starts off with Christopher going away to boarding school and the animals throwing him a farewell party, and it also includes a sweet moment where Pooh and Christopher go by themselves to the top of a hill with lots of flowers and they sit and talk about how Christopher's favourite thing to do was nothing and he asks Pooh to always remember him no matter what, which Pooh promises to do. Then, Christopher goes off to boarding school and leaves a little box of childhood memories under his bed, and the next few bits are shown like it was part of a Pooh book, with both illustrations and live action mixed in together, which chapter titles such as "Christopher is very sad" and other things. While I thought it was a nice touch, I was a little disappointed at how historically inaccurate the events were (the real A.A. Milne did not die when Christopher Robin was a child). 

I love the overall look of the animals

It shows that Christopher Robin fought in the second world war and then came home to his wife and young daughter Madeleine, who he never met before since he was serving overseas. He goes on to work at a luggage company, and is so absorbed in his work that he neglects his family and doesn't realise that his marriage is breaking down and he's putting far too much pressure on Madeleine such as expecting her to read history books for bedtime. 

Spoiler alert: The man on the right is an asshole

Everything ends up coming to a head when he has to cancel a family trip to his family cottage when his boss tells him they need to cut costs by 20% and his boss suggests firing a huge chunk of Christopher Robin's team, something he desperately wants to avoid. When he tells his wife that he can't go on the trip anymore, they have a fight where she tells him that his life is happening right now and that their daughter is growing up and tells him how much pressure he's putting on Maddie and that he needs to treat her like a child and not like an adult. Christopher, however, doesn't seem to understand what she's saying and tells her that he'll go put his suitcase up, but is shocked when his wife tells him she never even packed him a suitcase since she knew he would cancel. His boss tells Christopher, that he will be working the weekend with him, but it ends up being just Christopher, who soon becomes overwhelmed and stressed on doing everything to avoid firing anyone.

  At the same time, Pooh wakes up to find that all of his friends are missing and nowhere to be found, so he decides to walk through the door of Christopher Robin's childhood house in the Hundred Acre Woods and ends up at a park right outside of Christopher's home in London. He climbs up on a bench and takes a nap only for Christopher to come sit on the opposite bench and begin to ask himself, "What to do... what to do...". Pooh wakes up and the two immediately recognise each other, other Christopher Robin doesn't take this as a good thing and believes he's snapped from stress.

A fateful encounter

However, after Pooh touches him and proves that he's real and not a figment of his imagination, Christopher finally accepts that his childhood memories were real and not made up. He asks Pooh why he's come to see him all the way in London, and Pooh tells him the rest of the animals have gone missing and he needs Christopher Robin's help to find them as he was the most clever. At first, Christopher Robin is very annoyed at this, but after Pooh accidentally wrecks his kitchen the next morning trying to get some honey down, he exasperatedly agrees to take him back to the Hundred Acre Woods and help him. 

They go to his family cottage and have to sneak past his wife and daughter to get to the other door that leads to the Hundred Acre Woods. The first thing he notices is how misty and almost spooky it is and they try to search for the other animals together, with Pooh leading the way with a compass Christopher got in the war. He tells Pooh to lead them north, but they end up getting lost after Pooh just follows their footsteps and they end up hopelessly lost. When Christopher Robin figures this out, he becomes extremely angry and yells at Pooh bear, upsetting the bear and causing him to run off. Almost immediately, Christopher Robin regrets this and tries to find Pooh, but ends up finding Eeyore and the other animals instead, who mistakenly think he's a heffalump come to eat them all. At first, he tries to reason with them, but when that doesn't work, he imagines that he's surrounded by heffalumps and makes believes that he's fighting them all off, with Eeyore making sound effects, which helps the other animals finally believe he really is Christopher Robin and come out!
 

lovely HD pictures of most of the animals

When the other animals ask where Pooh is, Christopher Robin admits he's scared him off, before suddenly remembering where he must be: and goes back to the hill that the two of them made their promise years ago. He apologises to Pooh and tells him that he just feels lost, and Pooh, in all his wisdom, tells Christopher Robin, that he's not lost since they found each other and they hug. They end up falling asleep and he spends the night out in he woods with the animals, who tell him in the morning, that they dried his briefcase and all of his documents. He thanks them and runs off to his meeting, but runs into his family at the cottage; when his wife, Evelyn asks him if he's come to spend the weekend with them, he doesn't now how to tell them about Pooh and his friends, and so leaves. Later on, Pooh finds out that Tigger took all of Christopher's work documents out and replaced them with things from the woods to remember them by, and Pooh tells them they have to take them back since a "Woozle will eat him". 

They run into Maddie and tell her they need her to go on their "Expotition" to give her father his papers back and she leaves her mother a note, which she finds and calls Christopher at work, prompting him to run out of his meeting and try to help Evelyn find her. At the same time, Maddie and the animals take the train and then a taxi to get to the office, but Tigger sees his own reflection and ends up scaring the taxi driver who gets in a crash, but when he tells the police officer that the animals can talk and move, no one believes him. They see a truck that is full of luggage going back to the office and they all hide away in the boxes. While Christopher and Evelyn are driving around searching for Maddie, he finally tells her about Pooh, the animals and the Hundred Acre Woods, and she's shocked and believe he's snapped from stress and needs to see a doctor... until Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger are thrown out of the luggage they're hiding in and land on their windshield.

Pooh and Maddie successfully make it to the office and are running up the steps, when Maddie trips and all of the papers fall and are blown away by the wind, with her and Pooh only able to catch one of the papers: a graph. Right after, Christopher Robin, Evelyn and the animals catch up to them and Maddie admits to her father that she had hoped if she got him his papers, he wouldn't send her away to boarding school. He finally realises he hasn't considered her feelings and tells her that if she doesn't want to go to boarding school, she doesn't have to go and they hug. 

They all return to the meeting and Christopher Robin tells everyone that his boss, the son of the owner of the company, spent all weekend golfing instead of helping him with the work and has a brilliant idea: their luggage is too expensive. If they simply lower the costs a little and offer paid vacation for all their employees, it will up demand and therefore, fix the problem of lowering demand. While his boss thinks it's a stupid idea, his boss' father thinks it's a wonderful idea and agrees and the movie ends with everyone going on vacation with the Milnes going through the magic door into the Hundred Acre Woods. 

Finally happy together

*End of spoilers*

All in all: I really wanted to love this movie, and while I did like it, I think it was a little darker than I imagined it would be. It also seemed like they tried to squeeze too much in at the end, but you can't deny that it was a very good, rounded movie and that the animals were amazingly life-like in their appearance and there was never any moment when you doubted that they were real. I especially liked that they made the animals more old-fashioned to fit in with the time and I will be buying it as soon as it comes out on blu-ray! Normally, my work will have a big dispaly whenever new movies come out on dvd and blu-ray and I'm hoping they'll do the same for Christopher Robin ;3 If you're a big Pooh bear or Disney fan, then this is a movie you don't want to miss! While I was a little upset at the way Christopher Robin treated Pooh at first, I think he more than made up for it for the rest of the movie.