In the mid-1960s, Walt Disney Pictures acquired the film rights to A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories and their stable of characters. Disney animators went to work on said stories, taking one story at a time and producing half-hour animated featurettes. Walt lived to see only one of the featurettes (Winnie The Pooh And The Honey Tree) completed. Disney continued to produce Pooh featurettes, however, releasing two more in the eight years following Walt's death (namely, Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day & Winnie The Pooh And Tigger Too). By the time Winnie The Pooh & Tigger Too was released in 1974, Walt Disney Pictures was in dire straits. The studio hadn't had a big success since The Jungle Book in 1967. The animated films following The Jungle Book had made some money, but were generally considered to be lacking in "Disney magic" and weren't financially lucrative enough to keep the studio afloat. It was during this period that Disney studio execs thought about the Pooh shorts. The featurettes had been critically hailed upon release, being called some of the finest animated shorts ever produced. The studio saw a chance to cash in on the featurettes' success by tying them into one film. The execs called in the voice talent who had worked on the earlier films to do extra voice work, while the animators produced wrap-around bits to insert between the featurettes. The resulting film, The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh, is one of the warmest films to ever come out of Hollywood. All of the characters are likable, the segments are well-written, and the animation is smooth and rich. The film deserved all the financial success it received (and it received quite a bit), and it deserves more attention that it has been receiving in recent years.
Alan Howell is a native of Southern California. He loves movies of any and all kinds, Hollywood, indie, and everywhere in between. He loves pizza, sitcoms, rock and pop music, surfing, baseball, reading, and girls (not necessarily in that order).
