My nostalgia for Disney movies has tended to keep me away from the sequels. I’m not interested in the live action ones, especially when they’re actually CGI and Disney is just pretending that counts as live action for reasons. I’d much rather watch the originals—you know, the things I’m actually nostalgic for? Only every once in a while does a sequel, even one that quickly follows the original movie, scratch the same itch. If I liked a movie in the first place, why would I want to watch a remake instead? And that is why it took me until this week to watch Mary Poppins Returns and Christopher Robin.
Christopher Robin (Orton O’Brien) has to leave the Hundred-Acre Wood, because he is going to boarding school. He grows up and becomes Ewan MacGregor and marries Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and they have a little girl, Madeline (Bronte Carmichael), and he survives World War II and gets a miserable job as an efficiency manager for a luggage company and what with one thing and another has pretty well forgotten his childhood ramblings. And then Evelyn and Madeline leave for the cottage in Sussex and he stays behind to work, and then Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings) shows up.
In other news, Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) is now in his thirties, and he still lives in the family house at Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane. His wife (Not Appearing In This Film) has died, and he has three children. Georgie (Joel Dawson) is the youngest; Annabel (Pixie Davies) and John (Nathanael Saleh) are twins. He borrowed money during his wife’s illness, and the acting head of the bank, William Weatherall Wilkins (Colin Firth), is planning to foreclose. Michael and Jane (Emily Mortimer) look for their father’s shares in the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, and then Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) shows up.
One of the reasons Christopher Robin hangs together better for me is that it doesn’t feel as though it’s as uncertain about its audience. Mary Poppins Returns is all over the place. Its plot is about losing your home. It’s trying really hard to be appealing to children, but also Mary gets a song in the bad Cockney accent that’s the trademark of the movies that’s absolutely packed with double entendres. And you know how children love [checks notes] Meryl Streep.
Christopher Robin isn’t afraid to be for adults. My eight-year-old watched bits of both movies with me, and she was clearly bored by it. I won’t say I was hanging on its every moment, but then I’ve never been the world’s largest Winnie the Pooh fan. I thought it was probably a better way of handling the whole thing than talking about the actual Christopher Robin Milne, who hated being Christopher Robin. I’m not sure there was really a point to having it be a Winnie the Pooh story other than to get the name recognition, though.
MPR is flashier. It’s kind of satisfying that it lost three of its four Oscar nominations to Black Panther, for Costumes, Production Design, and Score. (“The Place Where Lost Things Go” lost to “Shallow” from A Star Is Born; Christopher Robin lost Visual Effects to First Man, and Black Panther wasn’t nominated.) It’s clear that they counted on its being A Lot—it’s got the feel of Most Production Design, at least in the more fantastical moments. The less fantastical ones are just similar to the original.
As for the music . . . oh, it’s bad. Pamela Travers notoriously hated the Sherman Brothers and all their works (except, I believe, “Feed the Birds,” a song it’s basically impossible to hate). One of her requirements for letting Disney do a stage musical was to forbid everyone who had anything to do with the movie in general and the Shermans in particular from being involved. The estate kept in that requirement when allowing Disney to do this version, and I feel as though the ghost of Travers owes the Shermans an apology given how bad these songs are. Though my eight-year-old liked that “Topsy Turvy” one.
It’s not exactly subtle that the Pooh has a red shirt, even though the various characters looked more like the original E. H. Shepard illustrations than their Disney counterparts. After all, they do want you to keep thinking Disney when you think Pooh. Not all of the characters were voiced by their current Disney performers; there’s a Doctor in there, plus ubiquitous Weaselly Guy Toby Jones. Apparently they kept Jim Cummings and Brad Garrett because audiences had expectations of those voices, but they did originally recast. Still, you’re supposed to remember this is the Disney Pooh.
They similarly want you to remember how much you like the original Mary Poppins. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s also puttering around as Bert’s nephew Jack, with a similarly bad accent. (It’s hard to overstate how weird the accent choices are in this movie. How do you make Emily Blunt’s English accent sound fake?) Angela Lansbury and Dick Van Dyke get cameos, making them the oldest people ever to appear in live-action Disney movies. Meryl Streep’s Topsy is clearly supposed to remind you of Uncle Albert. There’s a scene with combined live action and animation, like in the original. Karen Dotrice gets a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo, which I call that because I did.
If you’re my age, you probably spent a fair amount of time watching Disney movies, because they were fairly accessible. On VHS, on The Wonderful World of Disney, on The Disney Channel, if you had it. I remember watching some in school, even, though my memories of that are vague. And there is nostalgia for those days. Childhood’s a simpler time, at least for most of us. And how else to remind you of that simpler time than stories about the failure of work-life balance and losing touch with your dreams and the loss of people you love?