Pooh's Heffalump Movie

Featuring the voices of Jim Cummings, Nikita Hopkins, Peter Cullen, and Kyle Stanger. Rated general.

Well, if the bright lights at Walt Disney Pictures were hoping the heffalumps will bring home more of that Oscar magic, they're sadly mistaken. Pooh's Heffalump Movie is a lot of fun, sure, but it can't hold a honey spoon to the original featurette, "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day".

That one, which won an Academy Award for animation in 1969, includes a singing-and-dancing dream sequence (stolen from Dumbo) in which we are introduced to both heffalumps and woozles, and find them to be upsetting. Sample: "If honey's what you covet you'll find that they love it/Because they guzzle up the things you prize".

In more contemporary times, we learn that heffalumps have come to inhabit not the imagination but an area adjacent to the Hundred Acre Wood, one never yet explored by generations of fans of Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and the rest. This new land, Heffalump Hollow, is clearly meant to represent big themes, such as Otherness, the Unknown, and even Adulthood. You can tell it's strange and scary: its inhabitants have accents! English ones!

What made for a brief but acute musical observation about the power we give our own fears has become, 30-odd years later, a morality play about tolerance. The Hundred Acre Wooders, led, as ever, by the headstrong Rabbit, set off to capture a heffalump but are brought up short when it's little overlooked Roo (voiced with promising talent by Nikita Hopkins) who locates the prey: Heffridge Trumpler Brompet Heffalump the Fourth, to be precise, aka Lumpy. Will our intrepid adventurers follow through on their daring boasts? Or will Roo be able to help Lumpy back to his mother and Heffalump Hollow?

I've been severe with this 68-minute feature. There are likable moments. Jim Cummings continues to do a respectful job of voicing Winnie the Pooh, quoting Sterling Holloway's peerless work but making it his own. The rest of the cast are equally careful with the legacy, though I miss Barbara Luddy's deep, maternal tones as Kanga. Eeyore continues his lugubrious, near-Buddhist ways: "The sky has finally fallen," he intones here. "I always knew it would."

Was it worth reinventing Pooh and the heffalumps for a new generation? No. The originals stand up well, and this trend to sequelize every success--PHM comes from the team that brought you 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, and Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure--seems corporate even for Disney.

But my eight-year-old son, Rowan, thought the food fight was hilarious, "the construction, operating, and catching of Piglet in the traps was also hilarious," and that the only unnecessary elements were Carly Simon's original songs and the typically Disney ending: a contrived climax involving a level of risk inappropriate for the age group intended. We see eye to eye on both those, but they probably won't be enough to put him off Pooh's Heffalump Halloween, coming soon to a multiplex near you.

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