A New Pooh

     Silly old bear!  Winnie the Pooh and friends made a hit come-back with this latest movie, simply titled Winnie the Pooh.  It consists of two well-known stories.  Eyore has loses his tail, and a contest is held for the person (or animal) who can find the best replacement.  Meanwhile, Christopher Robin has goes missing, and the only clue he leaves for the animals is a note saying that he was captured by a Backson; everyone sets out to rescue him.  Maybe these narratives are a little too well known; more than once throughout the movie I thought, Isn't there already a Winnie the Pooh movie that tells this story?  But the film puts enough of a fresh spin on the tales to leave movie-goers more than satisfied.  

     The flick switches between the pages of a storybook and the real-life story, with the narrator talking to the characters every once in a while to keep them on track.  The tale falls off the book pages and into the Hundred Acre Wood (sometimes quite literally).  There's lots of comedy, too.  Tigger, showing off some good slapstick humor, sneakily stalks his prey, a balloon, pounces, and then starts freaking out when it sticks to his fur.  Later on, after a flurry of jokes accidentally made by Pooh, Tigger attempts to train Eyore to be his Tigger Number Two, with a lot of paint and injuries, but no success.  Has Winnie the Pooh always been this hilarious?

     At 70 minutes long, the film's biggest, and arguably only, flaw is lack of length.  But Winnie the Pooh is really just a short, entertaining snippet.  It's good at what it does, which isn't something you can say for every movie.