IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (O. Henderson) review
AVClub (I. Vishnevetsky) review
Christopher Robin [2018] (directed by Marc Forster, screenplay by Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy and Allison Schroeder, story by Greg Brooker and Mark Steven Johnson based on the characters from the Winnie the Pooh books [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] by A.A. Milne [wikip] [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] [IMDb] and Ernest Shepard [wikip] [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] [IMDb]) is a lovely family oriented film that offers parents and children the opportunity to discover / rediscover these characters that like the once a boy (in the original stories) now, in the current film, an adult Christopher Robin (played by an excellently casted Ewan McGregor), many of us may have "left behind" for years.
For at the beginning of the current story the 8 year old Christopher Robin leaves the magical "Hundred Acre Wood" behind his family's cottage in Sussex, England, to (1) go off to boarding school, (2) grow-up, (3) go to War, (4) settle down after the War, (5) get married to a lovely and kind woman named Evelyn (played by Hayley Atwell) with whom (6) he had a lovely 8 year old daughter named Maddie (played by Bronte Carmichael), and (7) get a really boring job as an accountant "in the efficiency department" of a luggage (baggage...) company to support this grown-up and, let's face it, really really boring life. What happened?
Well it turns out that Winnie the Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings), the once imaginative 8 year old Christopher Robin's talking teddy bear, ALSO "woke-up" one dreary morning in that once magical "Hundred Acre Wood" to find that all of his friends Eeyore (voiced by Brad Garrett), Piglet (voiced by Nick Mohammed), Tigger (voiced by Jim Cummings), Kanga (voiced by Sophie Okonedo), etc, had disappeared. So ... in his disarming simple mindedness, he, Winnie the Pooh, decides that he's going to look for Christopher Robin because, "Christopher Robin would know what to do..."
Call it honestly a children's, a "Winnie the Pooh" version of the Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Matt Damon WW II classic Saving Private Ryan [1998], because _so lost_ had Christopher Robin become in life that he didn't even know how lost he was: When the adult, thoroughly responsible but by now all but soul-dead, Christopher Robin first encountered Winnie the "teddy bear" of his childhood after all those years, he honestly didn't know what to do. And he didn't understand why this talking teddy bear, who came back for him at this point in his life would, passing by a vendor of helium balloons, would _so want_ a balloon: "Why do you want that balloon so much?" the approaching middle age Christopher Robin growls at his childhood teddy bear. And Winnie the Pooh answers him, "Because it makes me happy."
OMG ... the rest of the movie unspools from there.
We don't need 10 balloons, much less a 100 balloons. But an _occasional_ simple / cheerful "balloon" can indeed ... help make us feel _happy_ ;-)
Excellent point / story!
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