Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005) – DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Frank Nissen

by Bill Chambers Pretty much everything I wrote about Piglet's Big Movie applies to Pooh's Heffalump Movie: it's inoffensive but laborious, and the soundalike replacements for the original vocal talent know the notes but not the music. (Think that friend of yours whose Homer Simpson impersonation is perfect in every way except for its inability to make you laugh.) Carly Simon contributes another pallid batch of stopgap ditties to another frail narrative in which Pooh Bear is again hustled off to the sidelines. But melancholy has returned to the fold (because, I suspect, a certain Britishness informs the tone this time around), and since that was key to the resonance of Pooh's early screen and literary outings alike, we should be grateful that Pooh's Heffalump Movie deals with more urgent themes than is customary.

The Heffalumps of the title–an alleged threat to Pooh's hunny [sic] stash–were established in a dubious song from 1968's Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day that propagates the myth of the Other. To wit:

They're black, they're brown
They're up, they're down
They're in, they're out
They're all about
They're far, they're near
They're gone, they're here
They're quick and slick, they're insincere

Pooh and co. form an "expedition" (really a hunting party) to locate the source of a Heffalump roar that's sounding dangerously close. Mama's boy Roo (voice of Nikita Hopkins) wants to join them, but evidently his friends forgot the lesson of Piglet's Big Movie, because they tell him that he's too small. Striking out on his own instead, he meets and befriends the sensitive Lumpy (Brit Kyle Stanger (and geez, if they were going to be that lazy, why not call him the more subversive "Hef"?), offering welcome respite from the gravel-throated American boys typically cast in these quasi-orphan roles), a Heffalump who's basically the mirror image of Roo–down to not only his irrational fear of Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, et al, but also the fact that he has strayed a bit too far from home for his mother's comfort.

In hindsight, Pooh's Heffalump Movie was a necessary evil, first as a corrective to Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's inexplicable detour into Birth of a Nation territory (though it's a shame the Heffalumps have gone from being plaid (or multicultural) to pink (or Caucasian)), then as a lesson in xenophobia, something that ought to be mandatory viewing for kids of a malleable age in these aggressively bipartisan times. Bound to have parents watching their rhetoric afterwards, Pooh's Heffalump Movie is a humble little allegory, even insofar as it demurs when it has the opportunity to join the ranks of Disney tearjerkers by permanently rending a parent and child asunder. If I can't say I'm looking forward to The Rabbit Movie, neither can I dismiss the medicinal properties of Pooh's latest big-screen outing. It's kind of sweet, too.

THE DVD
Disney DVD's 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation of Pooh's Heffalump Movie betrays edge-enhancement now and again, but that's a minor distraction at best. Black level is bold and colours are as striking as a bowl of M&M's. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is characteristically modest, although the surround channels actually come in to play for a change, with the Heffalump call often emanating from one or both of the rear discretes. Extras include: a skip-to-a-song feature; a fairly challenging "Hide 'N Seek with Roo and Lumpy" game; an aggravating Backstage Disney making-of, "Welcome to the Family, Lumpy" (7 mins.), in which the filmmakers pretend they 'met' Lumpy and delve into the Heffalump culture from a faux-anthropological rather than a creative standpoint–and let me just say that we're probably in a culture war because adults insist on patronizing kids like this, effectively stunting their intellectual growth; and printable colouring pages, which join a "Rumpadoodle" recipe under the ROM-based table of contents. Sneak peeks at Chicken Little, Little Einstein, Pooh's Heffalump Halloween, Disney Princess, Winnie the Pooh: Shapes and Sizes, Winnie the Pooh: The Wonderful World of Words, Pooh's Grand Adventure, Tarzan II, and JoJo's Circus round out the disc.

88 minutes; G; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1; English SDH subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Disney