40 Years, 40 Disney Movies: Counting Down to Daddy’s Birthday Night 22 – The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh!

I know what you are thinking. These SUPER DEE DUPER DADDY DISNEY NIGHTS are really coming fast and furious, aren’t they? Erm you are either thinking that or you are thinking how did my Google search for blogs about poo lead me here?

Well, freak, we only have like 80 days left until we head down to Disney so we are churning these things out faster than those awful golden retriever puppy movies. OK fine…Spooky Buddies was ok.

Yeah so, for this one we headed over to the Hundred Acre Wood to spend some time with a bear prone to overeating and underthinking, a pig with an inferiority complex and a donkey that may be dealing with depression we should probably stop ignoring. Yup. Winnie-the-Pooh.

And we had some company for this one. And no, they weren’t just my stuffed animals like in high school. This time, we actually had friends over. My niece Holly came over and so did Emily from next door.  And so did Mr. Sparklepantz, my favorite stuffed unicorn slash cuddle buddy when I couldn’t find a date for prom.

My mom says they’ll all be sorry when I’m a huge success someday. I can’t wait.

The food

 

The cuisine for the night was largely hunny-based on account of Pooh bear pretty much risking personal injury and taking advantage of loved ones just for a smackerel. So we had honey barbecue chicken, tossed salad with honey mustard dressing, honey Teddy Grahams and honeybuns for dessert. We also had some tea with honey while we watched the movie.

Oh right and we had vegetables from Rabbit’s garden. Carrots and broccoli to be exact. After all this honey talk, this paragraph feels like a real downer.

The activities

We had a couple activities for this one. Actually, we even had to eschew one of our planned activities because we had just so much to do. First we played this game that Nickie actually had to rescue from our trash as I had recently cleaned out our game closet due to it being a black hole of long-unplayed chutes, ladders and gumdrop mountains. We played that Honey Bee Tree game that I always thought was called Don’t Wake the Bees. But essentially, you have to pull the leaves out without letting too many bees fall into your, I don’t know…bee section? It’s a game for toddlers but it’s obviously too hard for me to explain and we all had a blast playing it. So, despite it’s awkward vertically-designed box, it’s going back in the game closet I guess. Thanks Winnie-the-Pooh!

Being that this is like Owen’s favorite movie, character and thing ever in the entire universe, he got a new Winnie-the-Pooh Uno game and the kids played that with Holly as well. I think Owen won actually…so proud. Also, this worked out well as Owen does not enjoy losing things.

The movie

I feel like The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh is one of those movies where if I heard someone tell me they didn’t like it, I would immediately distrust them. I mean, how can you not like this movie. Oh you don’t like the cutest of characters? Oh ok…you hate childhood? Simple joy and wonder not your thing? Ah, you do not have a soul? Now I get it.

I love this movie and the original stories written by A.A. Milne. In fact, I loved these stories so much that when I was in college, I wrote a term paper on them for my Fantasy Literature class. Heh, Fantasy Literature. I was so good at college. Did I ever mention I took Billiards as a class?

Annnnnyways. I love these stories because, well, they are childhood. They express so perfectly how your world as a child is so all-at-once big and small. How a whole world can exist within the small corners of a child’s room and how best friends can be borne of nothing more than imagination (and maybe some stuffed animals.)

And everything about The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh enables me to remember what it was like being a child where the whole world was an adventure just waiting to be had. All the characters in Winnie-the-Pooh, to me, really encapsulate the emotions and feelings a child is learning to deal with and reconcile as they begin to experience the world around them. Eeyore is sadness. Piglet, fear and apprehension.  Rabbit, anger or annoyance. Tigger, confidence and bravado. And Pooh, of course is that simple joy and wonder I was talking about earlier. It’s like Winnie-the-Pooh is an early, more metaphorical draft of Inside Out.

And when, at the end of the movie, Christopher Robin is saying he may not be coming around all that much anymore, he is growing up. He has to go off to school. But he wants to know that his “silly old bear” will still be there even when he isn’t. That this world he created will go on even after he has to pursue more “grown up” endeavors. And this, to me, is why this movie fits so perfectly within the Disney canon. Because this movie explains why Disney still and always will be something I hold onto as an adult. It allows me to go back and visit those places and, even though I have moved on to more grown-up “endeavors,” I know thanks to Disney I can always go back now and then and say hello to old friends and enjoy even for a little bit, being that me again.