Robin lost in the Wood

Christopher Robin (G, 104 mins) Directed by Marc Forster Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2

We begin Christopher Robin in very a familiar place. AA Milne’s and Ernest Shepard’s vision of the Hundred Acre Wood has been brought to the screen more times than I can count. But director Marc Forster and his team still manage to make the place distractingly beautiful and seemingly fresh again.

It is Christopher Robin’s last day with Winnie and company before he is packed off to a stereotypically brutal boarding school. After school, the demands of a job and then a war will intervene, leaving Christopher’s childhood far behind, and his friendship with that unlikely talking bear dismissed as just the product of a lonely child’s overactive imagination.

We meet Christopher again in the early 1950s. He is married with a young daughter. He has a career as the ‘‘efficiency manager’’ at a company making luggage. But with England still in postwar deprivation, the demand for expensive suitcases is in free fall.

And so, this middleaged

Christopher must find a way to slash 20 per cent from the company’s operating expenses, on the weekend he had promised to take his family back to their country cottage for a break.

Christopher Robin does many things very well. It is a terrific looking film and also a very wellacted one. Ewan McGregor and Hayley Attewell are both perfect in their roles and the voices behind Pooh and friends all seem to be very well chosen. Jim Cummings has been Pooh in various productions since 1988. The familiarity is comforting.

I just wonder who this film is meant to appeal to. Steven Spielberg’s Hook, Toy Story 3 and even Despicable Me have all mined similar territory, but those films also worked at a level the nippers enjoyed. The parents might have appreciated the darker engines that hummed away beneath the facade, but they also all ticked the boxes as ‘‘kids’ films’’.

Christopher Robin, not so much. It might get under the skin of a few Mums and Dads. But the nippers sitting next to them are more likely to be crying with boredom.

For the first half – at least – the film is almost flirting with the idea this is a story about nervous breakdown and delusion. Christopher had a rough war and talking-bear-as-symptom-of-PTSD seems briefly possible. The moment soon passes, but it is symptomatic of a film that often seems to lose track of its reason to exist.

Some commentators are even reading Christopher Robin as a plea to halt Brexit, or a metaphor of a humbled nation pining for its lost days as the seat of an empire. Those ideas are possibly less ludicrous than they sound.

Or, y’know, it might just be about a boy who has a friend who is a talking bear. You choose.