BNP Goes to the Movies: Disney’s “Christopher Robin”

There’s an old saying that goes , “You can’t go home again,” but that didn’t stop Disney from trying with Christopher Robin, the live-action film based on A.A. Milne’s classic Winnie the Pooh book series. The movie asks its audience to take a trip back to a time before your childhood was swallowed up by student loans, jobs to pay the rent, and other grown up things. But is the destination worth the journey? The film opens up at a young Christopher Robin’s going away party in the Hundred Acre Woods, the magical land where Christopher’s friends Winnie the Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings), Tigger, Piglet, Eyeore, and others live. The gang is celebrating their friendship with Christopher before his parents ship him off to boarding school and away from the magical door that links Pooh’s world to his. The analogy of losing one’s childhood is driven home in a montage (because there’s always a montage) of Christopher’s slow march to adulthood. There’s the mean boarding school teacher, the death of his father (and the obligatory “You’re the man of the house now” line), fighting on the front lines of World War II, Christopher meeting his future wife Evelyn (Hayley Atwell), the birth of their daughter (Bronte Carmichael), and so on. With the montage out of the way, a middle-age Christopher (Ewan McGregor) is a beleaguered company man toiling away at at Winslow’s Luggage. Times are hard following the war and the wealthy just aren’t going on vacations anymore, which means fewer sales of Wins…