In lieu of such action-packed films as "Avengers: Infinity Wars" and "Jurassic World," "Christopher Robin" gives us refreshing experience with a childhood classic. Where the aforementioned summer blockbusters stare down seemingly hopeless scenarios, "Christopher Robin" teaches us to take a vacation from work. And, somehow, that lesson shatters my current lifestyle of school, work and rest. The silly ol' bear's simple perspective in life undresses our complex world to its "bear" bones, revealing the needlessly complex and harmful attitude we put in front of our happiness.
First, let's talk about the 100-acre wood gang's appearance. For the most part, they look as they might if they were actual, sentient dolls capable of thinking, worrying, bouncing and groaning. Winnie the Pooh, in particular, has a lot of face time, calmly looking into your soul with his literal little beady eyes, questioning your very existence. Interestingly enough, Rabbit and Owl don't quite have the same plush stitch work as the rest of the animal friends, perhaps to stay true to the original work's depiction the characters' life.
The movie begins, of course, with a going away party in which the young Christopher Robin…goes away. We're then taken through a montage of Christopher's hard life through boarding school, the early death of his father, his marriage, his deployment to fight in WWII and his return to his wife, played by Hayley Atwell, and daughter, Madelyne, played by Bronte Carmichael. Cut a few years to the future, where Christopher is now managing the efficiency branch of Winslow Luggage Company. His daughter, a smart but serious girl, approaches her first year in the same boarding school Christopher attended. It doesn't take long before the viewer sees how Christopher somehow lost touch with his childhood, which is putting a lot of pressure on Madelyne.
Christopher sends his wife and daughter to his childhood cottage on vacation while he stays in London to deal with large financial cuts in his company. During this pinnacle phase in Robin's career, the silly ol' bear crawls through "the hole in which Christopher Robin is known to appear," right into a small park across the street from Christopher's London home. From here on, be prepared to be drowned in solipsistic one-liners from an eerily calm and chaotic Pooh. Over the course of the film, Pooh's relentless disposition of life erodes Christopher Robins errorful adult mindset through a simple statement he made as a child: "Sometimes the best something comes from nothing."
Toward the second half of the movie, we see Tigger, Eyeore, Piglet, Pooh, and Madelyn embark on "an expedition" to save Christopher from the heffalumps and woozles, the heads of the Winslow Luggage company. We watch the heroic party retrace the path Pooh took with Christopher, encountering familiar sites, and performing the same jokes, such as the game "Say What You See, the game in which you say a-what you see."
This movie is, in a word, pleasant. The world crafted by Marc Forester is beautiful. I would call it magical, but the magic lies within his ability to turn the everyday object into something magical, like a red balloon or a pot of honey tracked across the house. I went into this movie skeptical, but I walked out feeling refreshed and at peace.
