›› TALKiNG PiCTURES
Thotful spot Grown men debate merits of honey-addicted stuffed ursid by Davi d Te mp l e ton
‘If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together keep me in your heart, I’ll stay there forever’—Winnie the Pooh
“A
re you kidding me? I love Winnie the Pooh!” On a warm afternoon in Healdsburg, as members of the band the Brothers Comatose mill about the stage waiting for showtime here in the sweetly landscaped town plaza, a casual remark to the sound crew has elicited a strong emotional response. As I sit chatting with Robert Lunceford and Jeff Austerweil of Authentic Audio, I casually mention that I recently saw Winnie the Pooh, the lovely new animated reboot of the beloved Disney franchise. Much to my surprise, Austerweil—who usually adopts a playfully surly public demeanor—turns out to be a proud fellow “Pooh-head” (like a Deadhead, but with Pooh, Piglet and Tigger instead of Jerry, Bob and Phil), with strong opinions about all things “Pooh”—including the movie, the anticipation of which I have clearly not been alone in. “Oh yeah, I love Winnie the Pooh!” Austerweil says. “When my kids were growing up, we
were all about Winnie the Pooh in my house. In fact, we all had nicknames based on the Pooh characters! My father-in-law was Christopher Robin, because he and my son had a very close relationship—and Christopher Robin was always helping people out. My son was Winnie the Pooh, my wife was Piglet, my mother-in-law was Kanga—and I think I was Eeyore. Wait, I might have been Tigger, ’cause I was always jumping around. Anyway, yeah, Pooh is great!” “I’ve always been more of a Wind in the Willows guy,” offers Lunceford, perched on a bench overlooking the crowd of several hundred people waiting for the concert to begin. Austerweil turns to Lunceford. “You’re kidding me? You don’t like Winnie the Pooh?” “Well, I don’t dislike Winnie the Pooh,” Lunceford replies. “I just prefer Mr. Toad and the other animals to the Winnie the Pooh characters. They’re edgier. They’re more realistic.”
Jeff Austerweil and Robert Lunceford, with show producer Dan Zastrow, middle—just three guys sittin’ ‘round talkin’ Winnie the Pooh...
“Wow guys! This is so typical,” I remark. “I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve seen devolve into a battle between Pooh and Mr. Toad.” Winnie the Pooh, the movie, is a lovingly rendered blast of nostalgia, so faithful to the visual style of the original 1960s Disney shorts it might have been discovered in the back of the Disney vault where someone forgot it existed the last 50 years. With songs by Robert Lopez (Avenue Q, The Book of Mormon) that have the same sprung-fromthe-’60s children’s-movie vibe, the new film even uses traditional two-dimensional hand-drawn animation—and the whole enterprise clocks in at about 68 minutes, Pooh’s stuffed-animal tummy being the only thing padded about the enterprise. With a story borrowed from the original A.A. Milne books, it’s a charmer of a film, one that apparently has as much emotional pull on baby boomers as it will for kids discovering Pooh for the first time. Unless, of course, you side with Lunceford in preferring Wind in the Willows. “I don’t have as much recollection of Wind in the Willows as I do of Winnie the Pooh,” says Austerweil, as members of the waiting band begin to hover nearby to hear our conversation. “But I do think, as I remember them, that those books are attractive to different age groups. I think Wind in the Willows is a little more aggressive, quite a bit darker, so it’s better for an older crowd. Winnie the Pooh is about resolving lighter situations, it’s gentler, it’s cutesier, it’s softer-edged.” And for what it’s worth, it was never intended to rival Willows, though people really do come down on the side of one book over the other. In reality, A.A. Milne wrote the Pooh stories, in part, as an homage to Wind in the Willows. The Willows stories, first published in 1908 by Kenneth Graham, were so influential to Milne that he would go on to write a play based on them, 1928’s Toad of Toad Hall. Milne’s first batch of Winnie the Pooh stories, inspired by his son Christopher’s collection of stuffed animals, was first published in 1926. “I remember reading every Winnie the Pooh book to my kids, at least a couple of times,” Austerweil says. “And we still have every Winnie the Pooh movie. We love Winnie the Pooh.” “Yeah, but aren’t those characters kind of one-dimensional?” Lunceford asks. “What do you want? They’re stuffed animals!” Austerweil replies. “How complex and multifaceted do you want them to be? The dilemmas they get into, all of those are little moralistic lessons. They’re sweet, those lessons. In Wind in the Willows the lessons are more like, if you don’t listen up you’re going to die! Or maybe just go to prison.” “Good point,” I jump in. “In Wind in the Willows, Toad is thrown into prison due to reckless driving, and the baby otter is believed to have drowned—until Rat and Mole find him under the protection of the Pagan god Pan. When Disney made its own version of the Willows stories in 1947, they left out all the stuff about Pan. Of course, there’s no overt
‘The Wind in the Willows’ was a major influence on the drug-fueled debut album of Pink Floyd—definitely darker than ‘Tigger Comes to the Forest and Has Breakfast.’
paganism in Winnie the Pooh either.” In truth, there’s not much that is eyeopening at all in the new movie—and that’s part of its charm. In this one, the worst thing that happens to anyone is when the animals fall into a pit and have to figure out how to climb out—which they finally do by stacking up words and letters knocked off the page of the storybook by Piglet. Yes, just like in the original movies, the pages of the storybook are used in ingenious ways—which include the characters scampering up and down the closing credits. “See, that’s the kind of cutesy stuff that makes me not like Winnie the Pooh as much,” Lunceford says. “It’s just too cute and fluffy and unrealistic. It’s probably because Winnie the Pooh is a bunch of made-up stories about a bunch of stuffed animals, where Wind in the Willows was about real animals in the forest.” “Real animals who talk and wear hats and jackets,” I mention. “What’s not realistic about that?” he asks. “The Winnie the Pooh characters are pretty realistic,” I continue, “if you look at them from the perspective of their psychological conditions.” “What are you talking about?” Austerweil laughs. “Tigger needs Ritalin,” I suggest. “Eeyore could use some Prozac, and Piglet clearly needs to be put on anti-anxiety meds. Every one of those animals has some kind of mild disorder.” Both Lunceford and Austerweil consider this. “Yeah, well... so what?” Austerweil finally says. “Sounds exactly like my family.” ✹ Talk more pics with David at talkpix@earthlink.net.
It’s your movie, speak up at ›› pacificsun.com JULY 22 - JULY 28, 2011 PACIFIC SUN 25