Movie Review: “Christopher Robin”

An enchanted masterpiece no one is too old for.

Rachael Jaeger
Staff Writer

The opening of Christopher Robin has quite the magical flow with its pages flipping forwards like what the old movies did.

After I watched the new movie, I could not help but recognize that while the illustrations had imagination and feeds into our childhood nostalgia of Winnie the Pooh, the illustrations are a symbol of the chapters of life. 

It is the fact that life progresses and you cannot stop growing older. At the same time, just because you accumulate more responsibilities, you cannot forget the playful and innocent soul who was once you.

The inner child in you is the force that enables you to cope when life hits hard or becomes too stressful to bear. 

The catalyst in Christopher Robin would be all the friends—Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo, Rabbit, Owl, and Tigger—gathering for tea to say goodbye to Christopher Robin who is heading off to boarding school.

Christopher Robin and Pooh sit with a jar of “hunny” on a log for the last time and Christopher Robin promises Pooh that he will never forget Pooh.

But he does. Christopher Robin grows up, meets a woman on a train and gives his seat up for her and she becomes his wife. He also serves in the war, during which his daughter Madeline is born and because he is away, they meet for the first time when she is three years old.

The audience, however, does not see them playing together but rather Christopher Robin becomes consumed in his company that sells luggage. 

Ultimately, the boss’s son tells Christopher Robin that over the weekend, he must figure out a solution to cut twenty percent in the company or it will go under. He also gives Christopher Robin the alternative that he can select employees from the company to let go.

That only adds to Christopher Robin’s nerves, as he promised his wife and Madeline that they would go away for the weekend. The boss’s son gives a snippy reply that dreams aren’t just free, that you have to work for them. 

Christopher Robin has his own apparent expectations of his daughter, like sending her off to boarding school despite she expresses her unhappiness about it.

Instead of reading to her fun stories to bed, he chooses a factual book that bores her and she excuses herself by saying she is too sleepy. Later Madeline asks her mom if her dad was ever a kid.

And that is exactly who Madeline is content to be. She stumbles across the characters he drew of Pooh and the others when he was her age. She leaves him a note, complimenting him and suggesting that they can hang their pictures side by side. 

Meanwhile in the Hidden Acres, Pooh wakes up and discovers his friends are nowhere to be found. He believes a “heffalump” has kidnapped his friends and ends up in a park in New York outside of the building where Christopher Robin works. 

 Pooh is the first friend who Christopher Robin sees soon after he sinks onto a bench and murmurs to himself, “What to do, what to do?” At the same time Pooh, who has lost all his other friends and sitting on the other side of the bench, asks himself the same question.

Then their bodies both turn towards each other at the same moment and are reunited. 

But regardless, it is a bumpy start. At first Christopher Robin sees Pooh as no more than a nuisance who is preventing him from finding a solution to the company’s finances.

Pooh gives back to Christopher Robin his advice so long ago about how nothing is the best thing to do. That’s advice any stressed adult should take. 

What I also gather is that Pooh is Christopher Robin’s child consciousness, which is the reason why the two have similar mannerisms. 

I will not say anymore about how Christopher Robin and Pooh find the other friends. However, What I found striking is that Christopher Robin realizes he has become a “heffalump” and seeks to change for the better of his family. 

Even though you are an adult, you are not too old to see this movie. If you need fresh insight into life and feel anxious and overwhelmed about your future or certain aspects of your life, this movie will be some means of chasing away your own “heffalumps”. 

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr.