I don’t plan to make a habit of buying Disney sequels, but the kids like The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) so much, and I have fond enough memories of The Tigger Movie (2000) and Piglet’s Big Movie (2003), both of which I saw on the big screen, that I decided to buy a boxed set that includes both of these sequels as well as Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005), which I had not yet seen. And what do you know, the kids — my daughter in particular — have become big fans of Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, or the “mommy elephant” movie, as my daughter calls it.
But here’s where things get dicey. The film concerns the fear that Pooh and his friends feel when they hear the Heffalumps from a distance, and near the end of the film, when they finally come across a baby Heffalump in person, they lasso it and try to capture it — and this is after the Heffalump has been caught in a trap made of twigs and branches. What Pooh and his friends don’t realize is that little Roo, whose mother Kanga has been looking for him, has already met the Heffalump and befriended it — and so, as Pooh and friends stand there holding their ropes, Roo makes an impassioned plea to set the Heffalump free, while his proud and understanding mother Kanga also stands there, beaming beatifically at Roo and offering him moral support.
It’s a little more moralistic, and potentially even traumatic, than the stories in the original Pooh film, but I can sort of deal with that. Certainly my kids don’t seem to mind. But I can’t help thinking I am setting my kids up for an even greater confusion when Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! comes out on DVD later this year. Yeah, sure, each of the twins has seen the film in the theatre once, but that’s nothing compared to watching the film again and again at home — and in Horton, if memory serves, a noble elephant is trapped or tied up by an even worse mob, an angrier mob, and in that film, the mother kangaroo is the primary antagonist, and not the defender of good! (I can’t find any photos from this scene online, so I’ll make do with the image below, which at least conveys the antagonism.)
Now, this may not be all that big an issue. Certainly my children have already had to deal with similar species role-reversals; consider how the striped feline creature in the Pooh movies, i.e. Tigger, is a fun, jovial, good sort of chap, whose non-stop bouncing has been a source of inspiration to my ever-jumping son, whereas the striped feline creature in The Jungle Book (1967), i.e. Shere Khan, is an out-and-out villain, whose fights with Baloo always prompt my daughter to yell at the screen, “No pushing! No pushing!” (Hmmm, come to think of it, she does say that to her brother a fair bit, too.)
But, y’know, I think I’ll be monitoring this situation anyway.
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