Christopher Robin (2018)

Heffalumps and Woozles take centre stage for Episode 60 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex take a trip deep into Hundred Acre Wood to confront Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018) (not to be confused with the earlier A.A. Milne biography Goodbye Christopher Robin [Simon Curtis, 2017]), and its pleasures of nostalgia. For this latest Listeners’ Choice, they discuss the role of illustration and illusionism in relation to Disney’s earlier Winnie the Pooh animated adaptations; how imagination and impossibility manages the film’s treatment of childhood fantasies, and the extent to which this is mirrored in elements of Christopher Robin’s digital/analogue production; the politics of niceness and the film’s gestures to a Trump-era “nicecore” cinema that delights in kindness and the intrinsic value of ‘being good’; the construction of a malleable, fluid virtual urban space to form bricolage architecture (particularly in its CG portrayal of postwar London); what Christopher Robin has to say about coming back to family, returning home, and simply seeing the world differently; and how doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something.