H Picturing Pooh
How the makers of ‘Christopher Robin’ gave a beloved bear and his fuzzy friends new life
E’S been around for more than 90 years, but Winnie the Pooh’s never been afraid of a makeover. His latest look arrives in theaters on Friday in “Christopher Robin,” which plops animated characters into a live-action world.
The year is 1949, and the imaginative title character is now a grown man (Ewan McGregor), working as an efficiency manager for a luggage company. While struggling to balance work and family, he’s reunited with Pooh and the rest of the Hundred Acre Wood gang. Only then does he rediscover what really matters in life.
The process for designing Pooh and his friends began with the film’s time period.
“The key for me [was] that this is a bear that was created in the ’20s and feels like a well-hugged, used teddy bear that Christopher Robin was playing with in his childhood,” director Marc Forster tells The Post.
Forster, who’s returning to the magical realism of his 2004 film “Finding Neverland,” tasked character-concept artist Michael Kutsche with evolving the design of Pooh and his pals, including Tigger, Piglet and Eeyore. Forster wanted to mesh the look of E.H. Shepard’s illustrations from A.A. Milne’s 1920s books — inspired by Milne’s own son, Christopher Robin — with Disney’s early drawings from the 1960s, when the company bought the rights to the characters.
Another inspiration for Kutsche were Christopher Robin Milne’s own stuffed animals, which are on display at the main branch of the New York Public Library, at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The artist also examined the scraggly fur of the beasts in Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and looked at vintage Steiff teddy bears.
“Marc wanted to have something that has a certain seriousness and slightly melancholic appeal,” says Kutsche.
That’s translated through the stuffed animals’ aged fabric and faded coloring, as well as their glass-bead eyes.
“The eyes feel kind of a bit sleepy and dreamy,” says Kutsche, noting that they help audiences suspend disbelief.
“There’s something magical when a stuffed toy with the glassbead eyes comes to life,” he adds.
While the characters’ designs have been modified, much is still the same, including Pooh’s iconic red sweater, snug above his rumbly tumbly.
The hardest part of the animation process was Pooh’s sweater, Forster says, “because those fibers were all digitally re-created — every stitch, basically.”
Kutsche’s designs were used to craft handmade prop versions of Pooh and his animal friends — they called them “stuffies” on set. Not only did they allow the filmmakers to set up shots, but they also gave the actors scene partners. But the stuffies never made it into the final cut; instead, computer-generated versions of those critters were added in later by the visual-effects team.
Co-producer Steve Gaub recalls the first time McGregor — who himself had childhood memories of the willy-nilly, silly old bear — “met” the Pooh stuffy.
“His eyes went a little wide, he went quiet, and then he held him,” says Gaub.
“He had his own special, little quiet moment with who was going to be his co-star for the remainder of our shoot. He bonded really quickly, and it was incredibly encouraging to us that he just thought the world of our version of Winnie the Pooh.”
“There’s something magical when a stuffed toy with the glass-bead eyes comes to life.” — artist Michael Kutsche