The central message is about not being prejudiced against strangers but the film packs plenty of fun into 68 minutes.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
Lessons are learned and new friendships are made in Pooh’s Heffalump Movie.
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In her Constant Reader book review column for The New Yorker, Dorothy Parker famously lambasted A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh when it was first published, accusing it of "sedulous cuteness." Her final word? "Tonstant Weader fwowed up."
I’ve always thought Parker was wrong about the Pooh stories and no wonder, since she never got to read them as a kid. But I remembered her words when I first saw one of the Disney Pooh movies.
The twee qualities Parker objected to, like the ditties Pooh hums to himself or the way Milne capitalized certain phrases, in a winking reference to the importance the animals gave them, didn’t bother me when I was 7 or 8. I loved the meandering adventures of Pooh and his pals, finding something comforting about the hermetically sealed world of Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals. I could also relate to the pleasure Pooh took in simple things like a fresh pot of honey or a spring day. But what I loved best, I think, was how endearingly ridiculous the animals were. Like a troupe of earnest but inept vaudevillians, they were forever setting out to do something and getting it totally wrong.
Disney cranked up the cuteness factor so high in its TV show and its two earlier theatrical movies (2001’s The Tigger Movie and 2003’s Piglet’s Big Movie) that it drowned out virtually all the antic absurdity. The studio also flattened out the characters, reducing each animal to one dominant characteristic. Piglet was a scaredy-cat, Rabbit an officious, no-nothing know-it-all, and so on. It’s as if the animators reversed the process Milne had gone through to bring Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals to life. They also departed radically from the feel of the original drawings, making both the animals and the Hundred Acre Wood they live in considerably less realistic-looking and less subtly shaded.
Pooh’s Heffalump Movie takes the franchise in a welcome new direction. Hand-drawn rather than computer-animated, the backgrounds look moody and multidimensional, like Ernest Shepard’s drawings. Pooh and his friends had to maintain the flat look developed for the other movies, since a generation of kids has now grown up expecting them to look that way, but the animators clearly had fun inventing the heffalumps, which we and the other animals are seeing for the first time.
The original heffalump story was a slight little anecdote about irrational fear. Its climax is a nice bit of slapstick (Pooh gets his head stuck in a honey jar and Piglet mistakes him for a heffalump) and a hysterical cry for help from Piglet ("Help, help, a Herrible Hoffalump! Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump! Holl, Holl, a Hoffable Hellerump!") that had me crying with laughter when I first read it, so elated to realize books could be that funny that I still remember the feeling.
Pooh’s Heffalump Movie spins that bit of fluff into a tasty skein of cotton candy. Its central message is about not being prejudiced against strangers, but it also packs plenty of fun and a couple of poignant moments involving mother love and friendship into its 68-minute running time.
Like Disney’s other Pooh movies, this one is skewed very young. The filmmakers play smartly to their target audience by making Roo, the little kangaroo everybody dismisses because he’s so young, the hero. When all the other animals go off to hunt heffalumps and leave Roo behind, he sneaks off by himself to find one and he does, capturing a heffalump while the others come home empty-handed. But the real surprise is his prey, who turns out to be as young as Roo and just as eager to play. Roo and the heffalump become best friends, playing ecstatically until the grownups show up and nearly ruin everything.
Lumpy the heffalump, who’s basically a lavender elephant but a lot cuter, is so adorable he probably would have given Dorothy Parker a headache. Kyle Stanger, the British 5-year-old who voices him, ranges from irrepressible exuberance to plaintive dejection like the oldest of pros. Little Roo is a cutie too, thanks largely to 12-year-old Nikita Hopkins, who has supplied Roo’s voice in five Pooh movies since 1999.
The filmmakers left out nearly all of Milne’s word play, including the part that made me laugh so hard, and the little that’s left sailed right over the heads of the kids in the audience that I saw it with. But they loved the slapstick, the energetic play between Lumpy and Roo, and bouncy Tigger, who seems to be modeled on Jimmy Durante.
Four sugary-sweet Carly Simon songs threaten to tip the movie over the emotional edge, but the jaunty little heffalump’s purple heft keeps the scale safely anchored. In the end, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, like the book it’s based on, is a pleasure because it makes the friendships, fears and unadulterated joie de vivre of a handful of anthropomorphized stuffed animals feel so real.
Rated G.