Winnie the Pooh: Springtime With Roo (2004)

Lindsay and I wound up seeing this because our daughter has become fixated on Winne the Pooh. I believe we've now watched or re-watched all of the animated movies at least once; most more than that. Judging by her level of excitement while this was playing, I'm guessing we're going to watch this several more times, so I actually wanted to write it up before I become sick of the damn thing.

"More sick" might be a more accurate description. Don't get me wrong: I'm a fan of the bear with very little brain and have been for a very long time. Hell, I used to wear a Winnie the Pooh pendant in college, and I'd take it out when asked about my religion. It was a joke, of course, but my affection for the character is genuine. I still love the original Disney shorts and the movie they were compiled into, and I was pleasantly surprised to find The Tigger Movie - something I'd last seen in theaters - holds up. The 2011 movie is pretty great, too.

But as we've delved into the catalog of direct-to-video productions, the quality dips. Not as much as I'd anticipated, but noticeably. And, unfortunately, Springtime With Roo is at the bottom of the barrel. It's still not bad, but it doesn't have as much to offer as the other installments in the series.

But of course I've buried the lead, as I so often do. The real question most of you are no doubt asking is why I'm discussing an Easter movie on a Christmas blog in the first place. And the answer, as the handful of you who have seen this know, is that Springtime With Roo is a loose adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

Or at least the second half is. The first half is mostly set up. After the narrator opens the movie as usual, Roo jumps out of a conspicuously CG copy of a Winnie The Pooh book to be informed the story is largely about him (which is a little odd, because the story's really more about Rabbit, but I guess market testing suggested Roo was more popular or something). Regardless, the story properly opens on Easter morning, with Roo excitedly getting out of bed and hurrying off to join his friends in what he assumes will be an Easter celebration complete with an egg hunt. Everyone heads over to Rabbit's house only to find Long Ears getting ready to celebrate "Spring Cleaning Day" instead. He hands out assignments and tells everyone to get to work.

Naturally, things go about as well as you'd expect if you shoved the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood in your house and told them to clean it unsupervised (Rabbit headed into the garden). In the process of making Rabbit's house more of a mess, they also stumble across Rabbit's Easter supplies and decorate. When Rabbit comes back in, he's furious and throws everyone out.

Roo is heartbroken about missing Easter but also about Rabbit being sad. Tigger goes to talk to Rabbit, and the two of them - with the narrator's help - travel back in time to an earlier chapter to show Rabbit how much he used to love Easter. They read/watch the previous Easter (Roo's first in the Hundred Acre Wood), which Rabbit had painstakingly planned out only for things to go sideways as they always do. Rabbit overreacted (as usual), and the others just kind of wandered off and had Easter without him, leaving him feeling slighted.

Instead of rekindling Rabbit's love of the holiday, the experience reinforces the idea that he was betrayed. He'd loved being "The Easter Bunny" for the group, and felt like the title had been unfairly taken away from him.

Tigger returns to the present and goes to break the news to the others, but Rabbit's ordeal isn't over. The narrator takes the role of the other two ghosts, first by taking Rabbit to see Roo's house in the present then by turning ahead to the pages that hadn't yet been written. In this possible future, we're shown a world where all of Rabbit's friends have moved away, leaving him alone. He pleads with the narrator to let him fix this then wakes up in his own bed the next morning.

From here on out, we're more or less on auto-pilot. Rabbit's jubilation at having a second chance is straight out of the book, and for once the book isn't written by A.A. Milne. Dialogue is lifted almost verbatim ("I'm as giddy as a school-bunny") and his mannerisms echo various cinematic interpretations of Scrooge.

He goes to find the others and discovers them preparing to celebrate an Easter of their own, then reveals (in the style of the 1938 MGM adaptation, likely via Mickey's Christmas Carol) that he's brought gifts. He's also decorated a massive section of the Hundred Acre Wood for an Easter egg hunt in the five minutes he had to prepare. Somehow.

That's more or less the movie in a nutshell, though I am glossing over some filler that gives Roo some added screen time to justify slapping his name on the title. As takes on A Christmas Carol go, this suffers from having to cut the darker stuff. Death isn't really permitted in Disney's Pooh, so most of the elements that give the story weight are excised. That said, the integration of the narrator and utilization of the book-as-setting motif that's been with the movie franchise since the start is a fun touch.

We don't give Winnie the Pooh enough credit for helping to normalize the sort of fourth-wall-breaking use of the medium that helped pave the way for the Spider-Verse movies.  

Beyond that, there's not much here to recommend, at least not for adults (again, my kid won't stop screaming about hiding eggs for Pooh, so take that as an endorsement and/or cautionary tale). There are a handful of good moments throughout, but it's neither as clever nor as memorable as the other direct-to-video Pooh movies, to say nothing of the ones released to theaters.