I went to see Pooh’s Heffalump Movie yesterday afternoon. It’s a fun film, nothing earth-shattering. Someone who likes Pooh will like the movie. Someone who doesn’t like Pooh will probably be bored out of their skull.
The story focuses mainly on Roo. A mysterious sound awakens the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood one morning, and Pooh and after seeing gigantic footprints the gang quickly decide that the footprints could have been made only by a Heffalump, so they form an “expotition”–a reference to the episode in The House at Pooh Corner where they go in search of the North Pole–to capture a Heffalump. Roo, being just a child, can’t participate in the expotition, so he goes off on his own to find a Heffalump while Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, and Rabbit have comical misadventures in Heffalump Hollow. Pooh’s Heffalump Movie features a good message about tolerance and forming opinions of someone based upon who they are rather than who they are thought to be. There’s not a lot of Eeyore in the film, though, so if the gloomy one is your favorite prepare yourself for disappointment. Neither does Owl nor Gopher (“I’m not in the book, you know”) appear, though Christopher Robin does make an appearance at the films’ end. Previous Pooh films have used the narrative framework of a narrator (most recently, Michael “Basil Exposition” York of the Austin Powers movies) reading from a Pooh storybook, but Pooh’s Heffalump Movie dispenses with that and starts with the story planted firmly in the Hundred Acre Woods.
The target audience is, as you might expect, kids eight and under. Indeed, my screening had seven people–three parents, three very young children, and me.
As I said, if you like Pooh, you’ll like Pooh’s Heffalump Movie. It’s not a ground-breaking film. The animation is decent. You won’t learn the meaning of life. But it’s a nice enough way to while away a little more than an hour, and Pooh will bring out the inner kid in all of us.
Originally published here.