Or at least my parents thought it was a good thing to get me into.
It was one of the earliest favorite things that I dropped, probably even before I was eight years old. But there were Winnie the Pooh stories around my house and I believe between us, my sister and I had a stuffed Pooh and a stuffed Piglet, I think her the latter and me the former. I don't remember now the character's incarnations on TV and the movies at the time, and now that I think about it, I don't think I have any movies featuring Winnie the Pooh from this era entered into my big movie list. But I remember very well the voice actor who played Pooh, and the exact tone he would use when he said "Oh bother!"
Well I haven't seen Winnie the Pooh, the 2011 Disney animated movie.
I haven't seen Goodbye Christopher Robin, the 2017 film directed by Simon Curtis, in which the characters of Hundred Acre Wood appear.
I haven't seen Christopher Robin, the Ewan McGregor starrer that came out a year later, that also features Christopher, Pooh, and Pooh's other animal friends.
And yet I have now seen the 2023 film where Winnie the Pooh is a demented backwoods killer in the mode of Leatherface from the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
I noticed Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey show up on Kanopy a little while back, in the past couple months, and added it to my watchlist pretty much straight away. But I couldn't make any progress toward an actual viewing. There was just something too horrible about it.
In case you aren't up on how this came to be, in 2022, A.A. Milne's classic characters came into the public domain after the 95-year copyright on the material expired. That meant that anyone could use Winnie the Pooh in any way they saw fit, without the need for permission or without providing any recompense.
So of course someone made a horror movie. I'm not sure if this is even the only horror movie someone made. In fact, it's definitely not as there was a sequel a year later, which would have been last year.
On Friday night, I took the plunge.
And did not hate it.
A writer-director with the greatest name I've heard in some time -- Rhys Frake-Waterfield -- actually has some skill. This movie might have been made for hackish, prurient, opportunistic and distasteful reasons, but it is not made without skill.
In fact, I was somewhat taken with the explanation for why Pooh and Piglet go bad. After Christopher Robin "abandons" them -- in other words, grows up -- they have a tough winter in which there's no food, and go feral, killing and eating Eeyore. After this, they vow never to speak again and to kill any humans who cross their path, specifically Christopher Robin. This is told in the sort of simple, merely suggestive drawings you might see in a children's book like the ones A.A. Milne actually wrote, with narration from a sufficiently intellectual sounding Brit.
Nothing that happens after this is merely suggestive.
No explanation for what happened to Owl, Kanga, Rabbit, Roo and Tigger -- yes I had to look these names up, all but the last -- but Pooh and Piglet are still living in Hundred Acre Wood, a bit like the Leatherface family would have lived if they'd lived there instead of Texas. When Christopher Robin returns with his wife? fiancee? to try to find them -- having no idea what happened to them after he last saw them -- it's not going to turn out well for them, or for a bunch of girls staying in a nearby cabin.
Blood and Honey has the courage of its grotesque convictions. And they are pretty grotesque.
There's the physical grotesquery. Pooh and Piglet kill people in a variety of gross ways. They have no weapon of choice. Sledgehammers, car tires, knives, chains, and even just pure blunt trauma, unrelated to sledgehammers, all factor in. And these scenes don't hold back.
You could say that gore is cheap, but people who have watched a lot of gore know that some gore is silly and forgettable, and other gore you carry with you. I'm not going to go so far as to say that Blood and Honey will haunt me, but there are at least two kills in here that I will remember every time I think back to this movie. As a person who has seen a lot of gore, I consider this a compliment.
But then there's the emotional grotesquery. You'd expect the makers of this movie to have some instinct toward reclaiming the innocence at the core of these characters, before they went feral, but nope, they don't have that. That public domain status for the intellectual property, which I guess is no longer defined as "property," freed them up from having to even make token gestures toward character redemption. And they do not make these token gestures.
Then there's the part of me that is a little sickened by the idea of making a movie just because you can. I don't love the precedent here. I don't remember if there are other sacred characters who have fallen into the public domain recently, but I seem to remember there was another one beyond Winnie. Well, this movie and whatever success it had -- enough to make a sequel, not enough to break a 3 user rating on IMDB -- means that any other characters who slip into the public domain will, within one year, have similar movies in which they are raving maniacs who saw people's heads off.
Still, I found myself giving Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey a three-star rating on Letterboxd. There's some other technique used here that I didn't mention, for example, the forced perspective scene where Pooh is seen from below, towering over some rough hillbilly type who looks like a cowering child in the foreground, half of whose face he's about to take off with his paw. I credit the evident ability on display here, as well as the memorable gore, in being real with myself and admitting that I liked this movie, even if I didn't like the idea of the movie.
Making a movie where the Winnie the Pooh is a killer doesn't change anything about the fact that I had a stuffed Winnie the Pooh when I was a kid and I loved it.
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