Review by Lauryn Angel
Disney’s latest live-action film, Christopher Robin, (Directed by Marc Forster) is a charming film about growing up. The film opens with the title character as a young boy (Orton O’Brien) on his last day in the Hundred Acre Wood. Christopher Robin is going off to boarding school, and that means no more time to play with Winnie the Pooh, Tigger (both voice by Jim Cummings), Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Owl (Toby Jones), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo) and Roo (Sara Sheen), and Eeyore (Brad Garrett).
After a montage of scenes bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood, we next see the grown-up Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor), now a husband and father, at work. As the head of the efficiency department of Winslow luggage company, Mr. Robin has become obsessed with efficiency and he is more than a bit of a workaholic. When his boss, Giles Winslow (Mark Gatiss) questions his loyalties, Christopher Robin agrees to work on the very weekend he had planned to spend in the country with his wife Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and daughter Madeline (Bronte Carmichael).
It’s at this point that Pooh returns to Christopher Robin’s life. Pooh has found his way to London, and he needs Christopher’s help to find the rest of the characters from the Hundred Acre Wood. This, as you might imagine, leads to some very sticky situations (both literally and figuratively) for our hero.
The background about Christopher Robin’s life is very much intended for the adults in the theater, and, at the screening I attended, some of the younger children got more than a little restless. And while the scenes with Pooh and company are very entertaining for both adults and children, children under five might find it difficult to sit still for the first half hour or so. Aside from that, the movie is a great family film in the vein of Mary Poppins.
