Directed by
Don MacKinnon
Cast
Ken Sanson ………. Rabbit
Jeffrey Tambor ………. Santa
Travis Oates ………. Piglet
Chloe Moretz ………. Darby
Peter Cullen ………. Eeyore
Max Burkholder ………. Roo
Jim Cummings ………. Winnie the Pooh/ Tigger
Run Time: 44 minutes
Unrated (G equivalent)
DVD Release date: November 20, 2007
My Friends Tigger and Pooh Super Sleuth Christmas Movie is not your traditional Disney Winnie the Pooh tale. For instance, it features computer generated 3-D animation.
And there is no Christopher Robin; he’s been replaced by some big-headed American girl named Darby.
And one of the cast members is a creature named Lumpy of the previously mythical Heffalump race.
And Tigger and Pooh dress up like super-heroes and solve mysteries.
And Winnie the Pooh snowboards.
And there is some Dora the Explorer style talking to the audience.
For those not in the know, these changes were instituted by the relatively new show My Friends Tigger and Pooh, and this “movie” is more or less its extended Christmas Special. Despite all of these Pooh-related oddities, most of the characters stay relatively true to form: sad sack goth Eeyore, anal-retentive Rabbit, helplessly meek Piglet, but sadly no Owl. The show misses out on exploiting the inherit irony of using the addlepated, slothful, gluttonous Pooh and the bipolar narcissistic flibbertigibbet Tigger as action heroes. That could be some Big Lebowski style gold, right there.
The plot of this Christmas story revolves around the missing, magical sack of Santa Claus, the prepubescent, speech impediment suffering caribou set to find it, and the journey of the Pooh-land characters to return said wizardly pouch to that Jolly Old Elf.
It’s a surprisingly tolerable experience for adults, but perhaps I’ve hardened my soul on truly wretched Christmas specials like Frosty Returns, or any one of the three films I’ve seen called Jack Frost. It certainly is quieter than the standard Dora-like fare, in which characters maintain a constant level of incredulousness and shout most of their lines.
The very little kids should enjoy this film. The designs are all very soft looking, and colorful without being gaudy. The character’s emotions and motivations are such that a four-year-old can understand and empathize. Plus, it is only 44 minutes, which is handy for those toddler-sized attention spans.
It is all it really needs to be.
The DVD
Audio and Visual
The film looks and sounds as it should.
The Extras
We get Disney Fastplay, in which the trailers, movie and bonus features are shown automatically. This is great for those lazy parents and latchkey toddlers.
As always, Disney stuffs a bunch of trailers on these things.
There are two bonus episodes of My Friends Tigger and Pooh, totaling 24 minutes of run time. One is about Rabbit’s spring symphony, and another is about Tigger’s quest to find two snowflakes which are exactly alike. The first has nothing to do with the Christmas theme. The second completely dismisses the possibility of two identical snowflakes. (That uppity Darby thinks she knows everything.)
Finally, we are afforded the 100 acre wood downhill challenge, in which one selects a downhill snowboarding race course, a first person view is shown of said race course, and then one plays a match-the-present-to-the-character game. It’s better than some of these lousy kid games that Disney shoves onto DVDs, but one must wonder about some of the things in the gift boxes. (An entire big Christmas box for an after-dinner mint? Pooh is going to be disappointed when he opens that thing.)
All in all, the entire DVD might take up two hours time for your little one.
