OVP: Christopher Robin (2018)

Film: Christopher Robin (2018)
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Nick Mohammed, Sophie Okonedo, Toby Jones
Director: Marc Forster
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I think that Winnie the Pooh's place in my childhood means more to my parents than it does to me.  Pooh nostalgia has come in waves for Disney (arguably they're in a position right now where he's on the wane again, perhaps why the Mouse House brought him back in the form of Christopher Robin).  When I was very young I would watch "Up Down, Touch the Ground" and apparently laugh and laugh and laugh when Pooh's "stuff & fluff" stitching would come undone.  This was, however, before I could remember and so in large part my memories of Pooh are looking at the nostalgia for him that sprung up when I was in college (my grandmother getting very into Eeyore being a hallmark in my life, and in retrospect a rather strange side effect of this craze, as my grandmother is not really prone to pop culture trends).  Watching Christopher Robin, though, you don't need to have had a rich connection to AA Milne's world to come away from it feeling safe and warm and buried in its calming embrace.  Forster's film treads familiar territory, but it does so with care and makes this one of the better "live action" re-imaginings that Disney has crafted in recent years.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place after our most familiar associations with Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood have passed.  We now see an adult Christopher Robin (McGregor) who has by-and-large forgotten that Pooh even existed, dismissing him as a childhood flight-of-fancy.  Christopher clearly needs a reminder of who he once was, as he now spends his days as an "efficiency expert" at a luggage company, and plans on sending his daughter Madeline (Carmichael) to boarding school, much to the sadness of his wife Evelyn (Atwell).  Soon Pooh (Cummings, who also voices Tigger) returns to find Christopher Robin & Madeline, and tries to show him what the true meaning of life is with his former friends.

The film is not treading new territory with its plot, and indeed you see an almost exact replica of the film from Disney just a few months later with another beloved Disney property in Mary Poppins Returns.  But Christopher Robin does manage to do something that few remakes are able to accomplish in this era of Disney redoing everything-it feels warm & full.  So many of the Disney remakes, particularly Beauty and the Beast or The Jungle Book, are pointless endeavors where you know the story by heart and no one is adding anything fresh to the tale.  Christopher Robin is the first Disney continuation/remake in a long while where I felt inclined to seek out other films of Pooh's not because I wanted to see something better, but because I wanted more story, where the hook was baited well.  This is done through some solid work from McGregor (always underused, in my opinion, but bringing a light here that he never was able to as Lumiere), as well as heartbreaking work from Cummings as Pooh, a stuffed bear who doesn't understand where the young boy he once knew so well & who so treasured his company, has gone.  If you watch this and don't take your own childhood teddy bear off the shelf for a night, I think you might need your heart examined.

The film received one Academy Award nomination, for Best Visual Effects, and I'm going to be real here-this was a pretty clever & inventive nomination from the Academy.  Likely the spot that would have gone to Black Panther (genuinely I'm curious to see who ultimately wins the Oscar here since Marvel would have been a slam-dunk winner were it to have been nominated), Christopher Robin's effects have an artistry to them, using CGI to create a major character (lest we forget, this is still something that not every film can do well, even if it's become increasingly common in the years since Gollum found a ring) that not only feels authentic, but also is beautiful.  The work here with Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, and the gang is marvelous, both feeling like stuffed animals come to life while supporting the actual delicacy and ambience of the story.  This is exactly the sort of nomination I think looks weird when I investigate a random category for the OVP, but then I watch the film and am impressed the Oscars can still show such care in one of their tech categories.