YMMV / Winnie the Pooh (2011)

• Animation Age Ghetto: Besides being released the same weekend as the last Harry Potter film, a big reason why this film flopped is because Disney has constantly marketed Pooh towards very young audiences, with a lot of the merchandise being aimed at preschoolers and toddlers, resulting in many adults feeling they had outgrown the bear.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Madness Mantra known as The Backson Song. Bonus points for having been done by the Lopezes, who later did the songs for a certain ice-themed Disney film that had the songs often be considered the highlight. Most of the music is amazing, and definitely keeps the Sherman Brothers (and overall Disney feel) from the original film's soundtrack:
  • Pooh's own Disney Acid Sequence, Everything is Honey.
  • Tigger's assimilation song for Eeyore (in an attempt to make him a Tigger), It's Gonna Be Great.
  • The trailer's excellent use of "Somewhere Only We Know" touches the nostalgia nerve just right.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "Everything is Honey". It's a song about everything being honey that's all in Pooh's mind but it's unclear over whether it's an imagining or a hallucination. Even though Pooh has been hungry for honey since the beginning of the movie, this is never hinted at, nor does it go anywhere. And Pooh sees/imagines pretty weird things, like honey-pot-shaped animals.
• Character Rerailment:
  • After slowly being softened into Reasonable Authority Figures in the Disney canon (and thus too competent to be involved in the misadventures most of the time), Kanga and Owl are back to their more gruff and scatterbrained personalities from the original books, and only relatively having it more together than Pooh and co.
  • While Eeyore's trademark was becoming more superficial by the 2000 works, in this film, while still an Adaptational Nice Guy, he is more sarcastic and contemptuous again, and almost never smiles.
• Contested Sequel: Not just against Many Adventures but also the previous Pooh sequels. Some thought it captured the spirit of the original shorts well and others thought it changed too much (giving Christopher Robin a British accent while the other characters still sound American, making the characters too 'modern' in their attitudes, etc.). The film's Denser and Wackier tone was also divisive, with some missing the more earnest storytelling and Character Development of the New Adventures TV series and the Disneytoon films, while others prefer this film for being less syrupy and Aesop-driven, and instead being a full return to the sillier more oddball style of the original books and film. It contests especially with Pooh's Grand Adventure, which, despite having a very similar plot pivot, plays it in almost completely the opposite direction.
• Fanfic Fuel: How Pooh and the others would react when they finally found the Backson trapped in the pit is left open for interpretation.
• Fan Nickname: Because it features Jim Cummings and Tom Kenny in two leading roles, the movie has sometimes been nicknamed A "CatDog" Reunion.
• Fridge Brilliance: Why didn't Owl fly everyone out of the Backson pit? Well, in the books, he states that he cannot allow people to ride on his back because of "the Necessary Dorsal Muscles".
• Harsher in Hindsight: The use of “Somewhere Only We Know” in the trailer, after this became the last 2D animated film in the Disney canon for at least a decade.
  Oh, simple thing...where have you gone...
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The only real complaint most people have with the movie. Even for a Winnie the Pooh feature, which has always been fairly short on plot to begin with, 63 minutes is very short for a theatrically released movie, especially since the end credits take up close to ten minutes of that.
• Improved Second Attempt:
  • After solving mysteries and riding scooters in computer animation, Pooh Bear and his friends not only return to having simple adventures, but they go back to hand-drawn animation.
  • Not to mention it brings Owl and Christopher Robin back in the spotlight, both of whom had been Demoted to Extra or semi-retired during the mid-to-late 2000s.
  • And Tigger, who had come to dominate the franchise a little too much for some fans' tastes, is kept to a supporting role this time around — he's still very much a big part of the movie, even gets his own subplot where he tries to turn Eeyore into another Tigger, but he doesn't hog the spotlight like he's done in some productions.
  • Eeyore plays a major role in this movie after being severely Out of Focus during the 2000s.
  • Kanga is finally given some proper characterization and is portrayed just as fun and silly as the rest of the gang without losing her original motherly persona, fitting her perfectly into the formula and allowing her more screentime.
  • Tigger is finally added to the theme song.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • An image of Pooh squinting his eyes at a note has become a popular forum weapon, usually accompanied by the text "What the fuck am I reading?".
  • "Ever have one of those days where you just can't win?"
• Multiple Demographic Appeal: John Lasseter has said that the target audience "transcends generations."
• Older Than They Think:
  • This isn’t the first Pooh work to depict Christopher Robin with white sclerae instead of Skintone Sclerae. His appearances in My Friends Tigger & Pooh also depict him with white sclerae.
  • Kanga's more comical characterisation. Not only was this somewhat reminiscent of her personality in the novels, but Disney had already used a very similar take on Kanga in the Gold Key comic books in the 1970s and 80s.
• Questionable Casting: Many were not pleased with Rabbit and Eeyore being recast, especially since Ken Sansom and Peter Cullen were still active and under contract at the time. Cullen especially was very upset about being recast (going as far as to do a small skit at BotCon 2010 in which Eeyore is comforted by Optimus Prime), and his replacement, Bud Luckey, sounded nothing like Cullen or any of the previous Eeyores (at least Tom Kenny is a respected voice actor and at least somewhat sounded like his predecessor). Sansom also passed away the following year, meaning that he didn't get a proper sendoff as Rabbit. ^note Although this isn't entirely unheard of for a Pooh movie, as Paul Winchell failed to receive a proper sendoff as Tigger in The Tigger Movie, and himself passed away five years after said film was released, Sterling Holloway was also turned down for The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, similarly due to his worn voice. Cullen was later brought back to voice Eeyore for the Doc McStuffins crossover special "Into the Hundred Acre Wood!" To a lesser degree people are also split down the middle with Craig Ferguson as Owl and Kirsten Anderson-Lopez as Kanga (replacing series veterans Andre Stojka and Kath Soucie respectively and similarly having rather different interpretations of them).
• Signature Scene: Ask any average person about this movie and the first scene that comes to mind would most likely be the Backson pit scene with the ridiculously long Who's on First? gag.
• Win Back the Crowd: Disney's second attempt to apply this to hand-drawn animation. Like their previous attempt, it was a huge critical hit and broke even, but its release during a crowded movie season (especially the final Harry Potter film) rendered these statistics moot and Disney would once again drop hand-drawn animated features in favor of their much more successful CGI ones like Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana (which at least had some hand-drawn effects animation by studio veteran Eric Goldberg) and especially Frozen.

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