Pooh is back

It turns out that there was less pressure on Winnie the Pooh (opening today) than The Princess and the Frog to make or break the hand-drawn tradition at Disney. That's because it's a proven brand and doesn't carry the same kind of baggage. Still, even though it wasn't as artistically daunting as Princess (a tag-team approach because of a tight 10-month production schedule), there was the challenge of reinvigorating a franchise that had been watered down for cable and DVD.

The result is a Winnie the Pooh that channels the past yet bears an unmistakably contemporary stamp, with more slapstick and artistic plussing that comes from the latest and greatest digital enhancements. The honey, for instance, may look like CG, but it's actually hand-drawn with some creative Photoshop filtering.

Mattinson says early on they realized that the gang from the Hundred-Acre Wood was looney like Cuckoo's Nest, and that loosened up their creative spirit. "Let's have more fun with them," he suggests.

Of all the characters, though, Owl gets more attention. "At first, I went by the old model sheets to make it look just like the traditional Owl that everyone is used to seeing," Baer recalls. "But for some reason, when I looked at the test with Craig Ferguson's dialogue, I realized that he added a lot more. Same kind of personality and ego, but bigger than before."

"What's great about Winnie the Pooh is that these characters are so innocent that they can go off on tangents," says Hall. "If they have a particular goal that day, they'll leave the house and pursue it, but then something else is going to happen, and before you know it, something else happens and they've gone on circuitous paths. So we wanted to make sure that it was organically unfolding. We weren't imposing a story structure on the characters, but at the same time, it couldn't seem random. The challenge in story development was: 'How much do we structure this like a traditional movie, and how much do we pull back and let the characters inform the course of the film?'"

And considering how self-reflexive the narrative is, with the interplay between narrator and characters and sentences flying off the page at will like another character, it's clear that Winnie the Pooh is not just for kids.