| The Book of Pooh: Stories from the Heart |
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| Genre: | Animation - Family |
| Year: | 2001 |
| Rating: | G |
| Length: | 1 Hour 17 Minutes |
| Cast: | Mitchell Kriegman |
Cynics may suspect that Disney opened The Book of Pooh -- a new-millennium program of puppetry set against computer-generated backgrounds -- to milk even more honey from A. A. Milne's legacy. But clearly, as we see in the segments collected in Stories from the Heart, this is more of an update than a retread, and one calculated to appeal to contemporary kids with slapstick hijinks and an eye-popping visual style. Produced for the Disney Channel by Mitchell Kriegman, the Emmy Award-winning creator of Bear in the Big Blue House, this 77-minute-long program casts familiar voices as the captivating characters from the Hundred Acre Wood, even if the look is a striking departure from the original animated series, which was very close to Ernest H. Shepard's illustrations for the Milne books. Compared to Disney's earlier animated Pooh series, Stories from the Heart seems more faithful in spirit to Milne's gentle-natured tales of friendship. This is underscored in the first of the six included stories, as Pooh sets off over the hill to look for adventure, only to find himself twisted around and back home, where he gets to meet his very best friends all over again. There is one new character here, too: a chipper bluebird named Kessie. She's no Eeyore. But then, who is these days? Donald Liebenson
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