5. Crosses the threshold into another world, right through a door stuck in a massive tree. He pops into the world of the Hundred-Acre Wood, where he faces …
6. Tests, allies and enemies. The allies are obvious enough: All of Christopher’s old childhood pals are there, of course. Piglet, Rabbit, Eeyore and all the rest. But Christopher Robin gets creative when it comes to the quest’s enemies. Christopher Robin’s main enemy, really, is Christopher Robin. He’s so changed from his old childhood self that his friends don’t recognize him and mistake him for a fearsome heffalump. Christopher tries to tell them that he’s not a heffalump, but only comes across more like a monster than ever. And in the midst of this testing of Christopher’s character, he falls into …
7. The inmost cave. Well, actually, he falls into a hole, actually, but it’s pretty close to a cave—the place where all heroes on a classic hero’s journey must face their greatest fears. This cave can take many shapes. Many heroes dive into the underworld. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends had to breech the Witch’s castle. Luke Skywalker found his greatest fear in a literal cave in The Empire Strikes Back. And in Christopher Robin, Christopher must, in that hole, confront the reality that he’s far more like a heffalump than he’d like to be. That realization leads to …
8. The ordeal. To convince the residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood, Christopher Robin does battle with a horde of heffalumps. It’s a symbolic battle against his stodgy adult self (he even beats his briefcase something awful), signaling to both his friends and himself that he is still Christopher Robin, the Wood’s long-absent hero. And with his successful navigation of the hero’s ordeal he …
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