‘Christopher Robin’ Is a Sweet, Melancholy Trip Back to Childhood

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MOVIE: Christopher Robin
DIRECTOR: Marc Fosrster
CAST: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell
AVAILABLE ON: Prime Video and iTunes

The premise of Disney’s Christopher Robin pretty much guarantees its result. A grown-up Christopher Robin reunites with Winnie-the-Pooh, his childhood toy and imaginary friend. You can practically sketch out the rest of the movie from there and not end up too far off from the result: grown-up Christopher Robin is an adult who’s lost his childlike sense of … well, anything, and he’s initially scornful of the return of his weird, deadpan childhood pal. It’ll be up to Christopher to re-capture the spirit of his childhood in order to save something, and ultimately he and Pooh will again part ways, while keeping the lines of communication (and his connection to his childhood) open. That this is predictable (and that this ends up dovetailing with the plot of Hook a LOT) doesn’t actually diminish the enjoyment of a movie like Christopher Robin at all. In fact, the comparisons to Hook only underline the importance of execution, particularly in a story that is looking to recapture the spirit of a beloved piece of childhood entertainment.

The film begins on young Christopher Robin’s last day in the Hundred Acre Wood before he must leave for school, which is the only part of this film that’s adapted from A.A. Milne’s original Pooh novels (in this case, The House at Pooh Corner). In that story, Pooh promises never to forget Christopher Robin in the end. Here, it’s the other way around, as young Christopher promises to never forget Pooh and his friends Rabbit, Tigger, Piglet, Eyore, Kanga, Roo, and Owl. But of course, he does. He goes away to boarding school, grows up, goes to war, gets married, has a child, and gets a job at a company that makes luggage. Along the way he’s become a nose-down businessman, all square angles and late hours, and he’s just been tasked with cutting workers’ salaries to save costs. All the while, his wife (Hayley Atwell, who’s got more charisma in her little finger than most of the movies she gets cast in, and nobody seems all that interested in doing anything about it) frowns disapprovingly about how he’s letting their lives just pass him by.

It’s no surprise, then, that here is where Pooh re-enters his life. No surprise to us, at least; we’re the ones watching a Winnie-the-Pooh movie. It comes as a rather great surprise to Christopher Robin, who’s played as an adult with great stuffy bemusement by Ewan McGregor. Christopher remembers Pooh right away, but there is much time spent trying to quietly move the silly old bear back into the tree he crawled out from before we get to the part where Christopher remembers the joys of childhood and learns all the lessons he needs to be a better man, husband, and father.

The re-emergence of Pooh is also where the story begins to get both implicitly and explicitly melancholy, if not outright maudlin. Pooh comes searching for Christopher Robin because he’s lost Piglet, Rabbit, and the rest in the Hundred Acre Wood. It’s gray and gloomy there now. And to be completely honest, it wasn’t exactly a carnival of laughs over there to begin with. The Winnie-the-Pooh universe has always been a rather lowkey kids’ property. Pooh is quietly led around by his tummy and is given to odd turns of phrase. The rest of his pals are all given to some emotional extreme or another (Tigger is manic; Rabbit is obsessive-compulsive; Piglet is paranoid; Eeyore is depressed). In the years without Christopher Robin around, we’re left to assume they they’ve all been wandering in the unusually misty woods for … decades? Unseen and unloved? This is darker than the Toy Story 3 storyline where the unwanted toys all meet their own mortality.

As a Winnie-the-Pooh story, Christopher Robin is a bit disappointing in that we spend relatively very little time with our friends from the Hundred Acre Wood. Pooh is the exception, though, and it is really hard not to be charmed by such a guileless little bear. Pooh is neither cutesy nor particularly wise. He doesn’t seem to have much of an agenda beyond the acquisition of honey. Watching him take in the modern world is genuinely funny, and you wish you could see more of it.

Ultimately, the pleasures of Christopher Robin are mild, but director Marc Forster and writers Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy, and Allison Schroeder, by being unafraid of those melancholy corners of the woods, where our childhood friends languish in the cold, dark shadow of our absence, at least give you a lot to think about.

Where to stream Christopher Robin