Winnie the Pooh slowly enters a new era

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Eeyore (from left), Kanga and Roo, Owl, Rabbit, Piglet, Tigger and Christopher Robin join Pooh Bear in the new feature “Winnie the Pooh.”

Updated: July 17, 2011 2:28AM

HOLLYWOOD — Winnie the Pooh made his debut nearly 86 years ago. British author and playwright A.A. Milne wrote about the oddly named teddy bear in London’s Evening News. Christopher Robin, Tigger and the rest of Pooh’s friends from the Hundred Acre Wood were introduced a year later in a collection of stories about the toys of a little boy that come to life in his imagination.

Pooh was a sensation in Britain for decades but didn’t really cross the pond until the early 1960s, when animation king Walt Disney — who had heard about the stories from his own young daughters — acquired the film rights. Instead of making a feature-length film, though, Disney strategically decided to introduce the willy-nilly-silly old bear to American children in a 25-minute featurette, “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.”

The animated short was so successful, the studio followed with “Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day,” which did even better with audiences and won an Academy Award. With Pooh mania in full swing, the featurette “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too” went into production and was released. The featurettes were combined in 1977’s “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.”

More than three decades later, Walt Disney Animation Studios takes on “the bear of very little brain” once again in the feature “Winnie the Pooh,” now in theaters. The whole gang is back: Christopher Robin, Tigger, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Owl, Rabbit and, of course, the Pooh bear, in a G-rated comedy based on three of Milne’s stories.

In a summer of noisy popcorn movies, “Winnie the Pooh” offers a gentler paced alternative. It’s a classic story about friendship, adventure and a lost tail. No 3-D or CGI for this Pooh. It’s strictly old school in the traditional hand-drawn animation style.

“It’s a nice, calm conflict-lite environment,” says co-director Stephen Anderson, who previously helmed Disney’s retro-futuristic “Meet the Robinsons.”

Any ideas about jazzing up Pooh & Co., with new characters, modern problems or flashy new technology were dismissed from the outset.

“This is all about returning Pooh to his roots,” says Don Hall, a Disney animation veteran co-directing his first feature.

The mandate for Anderson and Hall was to keep Winnie the Pooh faithful to the books and the featurettes. That directive came from the top — Disney’s chief creative officer John Lasseter, who also serves as the film’s executive producer.

“John was a champion of this,” says Anderson. “He’s nostalgic for classic Disney but he also wants to make it fresh for today.”

The tricky part was the pacing. The original featurettes had a leisurely pace, but would that satisfy more sophisticated modern audiences? Test screenings helped the filmmakers find what they hope is the right balance.

“We didn’t want to go the route of the crazy quick cuts, but we also didn’t want to stick to strictly to the slower pace of the ’60s films,” says Anderson.

One of the techniques pioneered in the original featurettes and incorporated into the new film is the integration of the words on the page, the characters and the narrator’s voice — essentially breaking down the fourth wall between the audience and the film. Slipping that element into the new film was a no-brainer for Anderson, who loved seeing Pooh and his pals interacting with the words on the pages in the original shorts.

“The first thing that came into my head was Pooh standing on a block of text,” says Anderson. “As we made the movie, we put more of those in it.”

The filmmakers also knew they had to find the right voices.

“For some of the characters, they had to have imitations of the original because [the voices] just define those characters,” says Anderson, referring to Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore.

Voiceover veteran Jim Cummings, who has provided the voice of Winnie the Pooh for more than three decades on other Disney platforms including DVDs and cable TV, does the same here. (Sterling Holloway, who provided the voice in the original featurettes, retired in 1977.) Cummings also is the voice of Tigger, replacing Paul Winchell, who died in 2005.

“Paul was my old buddy,” says Cummings. “He told me he always thought of Tigger as a kid from Brooklyn ... mixed with a little bit of [Bert Lahr’s] Cowardly Lion.”

The filmmakers thought they could take more liberties with the voices of Owl and Rabbit. So they recruited Tom Kenny, best known as the voice of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” as Rabbit and “Late Late Show” host Craig Ferguson as the voice of Owl.

“It just seemed like a funny idea to take Craig Ferguson’s persona and put him into that character for Owl and see what happens,” says Anderson. “He’s played that guy — the egotistical blowhard — on ‘The Drew Carey Show.’ ”

As for the enduring popularity of Winnie the Pooh, Cummings feels there’s a certain quality that is timeless.

“The fact is there is no fad there,” he says. “These stories always will be sweet and the characters always will be great. No batteries required. Just bring your heart and you’ll be happy.”

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