Christopher Robin is a sweet movie and its concept is an adorable one: a grown-up Christopher Robin has lost sight of what’s important in life, but is revisited by his childhood pal, Winnie the Pooh, and given a new outlook. Good-natured and well intentioned, the film should have been an emotionally moving powerhouse about the importance of retaining the most innocent parts of oneself while struggling to live as an adult.
That being said, it is mildly guilt inducing to state that the film never lives up to the potential its premise would suggest. Instead, it’s a rather bland and predictable representation of beloved characters from many childhoods that stalls after a promising set-up and never fully recovers.
I’m sorry, Pooh.
Ewan McGregor does a fine job as the adult Christopher Robin. His reactionary performance is comically skilled, expertly timed, and dramatically moving at the right moments. His early scenes of rediscovering Pooh and seeing him through adult eyes are appropriately humorous and sad. In fact, everything about these scenes work so well that it is all the more disappointing to think of how unimpressive the film becomes afterwards.
Christopher then returns with Pooh to his home at Hundred Acre Wood to help him find his long-lost friends (Piglet, Tigger, and Eeyore chief amongst them). It is here the movie reaches a plateau, never rising to the creativity or emotion it needs to be great.
The time we spend at Hundred Acre Wood is too condensed, the supporting characters of the world are underexplored, and the movie forgets to make its audience feel the magic that Christopher Robin once felt in his childhood. Consequently, we never fully feel or understand Robin’s dilemma in being torn between his childhood ideals and adult responsibilities.
There are many routes Christopher Robin could have taken at this point in the film. Instead, it simply rushes back to reality and relies on a standard Disney formula to tell a tale about how growing up doesn’t have to equate with losing one’s soul. Great message, but we’ve all seen it before and it needed to be done with more imagination to justify its existence within a story that had so much creative potential otherwise.
Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, World War Z) is one of the most reliable and eclectic talents around, but he seems slightly dispassionate about the material. Or, perhaps, his Disney leash was too short to allow him to do his best. While he keeps the pacing tight and the tone pleasant, he never dives deep into the movie’s emotional core, and the film fails to properly soar as a result.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with Christopher Robin, there’s just nothing particularly great about it, either. A movie like this should bring up nostalgic feelings and remind us to look at life the way we once did before the world got in the way. Instead, it simply falls flat with a pleasant, soft, and adorably forgettable thud.
Winnie the Pooh deserves a movie for adults and children alike that remind us all what we saw in that tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff in the first place.
I’m sorry, Pooh, but Christopher Robin just isn’t that movie.
GRADE: C+
