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Disney's Christopher Robin hits theaters on August 3rd, 2018.
Almost all of the Winnie the Pooh short-cartoons, live-action television series, and animated-feature-movies etc. to date have always centered around the anthropomorphic Pooh character first created by British author, A. A. Milne. Over the years any incarnation of Winnie the Pooh to come into homes on a network or pay cable television or appear on home video has always centered around the honey-obsessed, lovable Pooh Bear himself and his friends, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, Roo. Pooh's best human friend Christopher Robin, has rarely been featured as prominently.
However, this time around, director Marc Forester has centered the latest telling of Pooh on Christopher Robin. The new film called Christopher Robin is a vision of what the young Robin would be like today; yet, as an adult, the grown-up Robin here still hasn't forgotten how as a young boy he had to leave behind his stuffed animals with whom he shared many adventures with, to live out his life and grow up.
Now in his-40s, and a manager of luggage company, Robin, play by Star Wars: Phantom Menace's Ewan McGregor, sees how he is spending more time at work than at home with his beloved family. As a means to rescue the workaholic, his family enlists the help of Pooh and friends. Leaving Hundred Acre Wood for the first time, Pooh and friends travel to the city to catch up with the adult Christopher Robin in an attempt to recapture his childhood wonder and remind him about what life is really all about.
It is a unique take on the Winnie the Pooh story. Actor Ewan McGregor signed on to play Robin because of how differently the film approached the adult Robin. "There’s an artfulness to it. There’s almost a darkness to it, which is surprising."
What makes the story of Robin so interesting in opposition to the typical appearance of the character in the Winnie the Pooh mythology is in how audiences will see him, no longer as a 7-year-old animated character, but as a live-action adult, and this is one of the aspects to Disney's new Christopher Robin the film that attracted McGregor to the role, "We know Christopher Robin, as a small seven-year-old from A. A. Milne’s books and from Disney’s animations, but we don’t know who he is, as an adult."
Although the story is a revisionist take on the Winnie the Pooh story, underneath its new take on the Milne characters, true to Disney POV, the film is still very much, above all, about family and life. As McGregor notes: "Pooh helps him to find this child in him again, who he was when we first see him, at the beginning of the movie. Life happens to him and he’s lost that, and Pooh helps him back to that. "