178 replies to this topic

[mrmando]

SDG, on 05 September 2011 - 05:59 PM, said:

Jeff doesn't find himself to be in a "hopeless" condition, and neither do I.

Well, you're in the condition of not being able to see that the characters in the film are pathetic caricatures of the ones in the book. Or, perhaps, of being able to see it but not caring.

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I can't understand what point you're trying to make.

See above.

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Actually, in the original order of things, I believe C.R. didn't have a stuffed owl -- or a stuffed rabbit. Surely you've noticed that Owl and Rabbit don't have seams or the other nursery-toy emblems possessed by Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Roo and Eeyore (pin-on tail).

According to which set of illustrations? (I'd consider the Shepard drawings to be definitive, and any others unworthy of analysis.)

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Owl and Rabbit, I think, occupy a different ontological space than the others; they are native imaginary creatures of the Hundred Acre Wood, whose prototypes, if they exist at all, are the real owls and rabbits of the wood.

Not sure you're correct, but it can be researched. Of course, even if C.R. does have a stuffed Owl and Rabbit, he probably doesn't have a stuffed Very Small Beetle or a stuffed animal for each and every Friend-and-Relation of Rabbit's. So we may have to admit the possibility of animals living in the H.A.W. that don't have real-world analogues. But still, those are native forest creatures and the Backson isn't.

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So, if C.R. and/or A.A. can imagine up Rabbit and Owl, why not a Backson?

That's the whole bloody point. In the film, the Backson is imagined neither by A.A. nor by C.R., but by Owl. This is not Owl's story; Owl is a character, not a narrator; what gives Owl the power to bring the Backson to life?

Edited by mrmando, 05 September 2011 - 06:40 PM.

[mrmando]

Well, we can definitively say that the real Christopher Robin Milne did not have a stuffed Owl or a stuffed Rabbit.

Of course, we can't know with certainty whether C.R. in the book does or doesn't have any stuffed toys at all, other than Edward "Winnie-ther-Pooh" Bear, who is the only animal that appears outside of the Hundred Acre Wood as well as inside it.

Edited by mrmando, 05 September 2011 - 06:26 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

mrmando wrote:
: I *think* Peter was referring to the "pot-smoking hairdresser" character voice of the Backson in the post-credits sequence.

Quite so.

SDG wrote:
: C.R.'s point of view is emphasized every time they do that live-action prologue/epilogue.

Well, to a point. We see the stuffed dolls, sure; but the prologue/epilogue in these films generally centres on a book, which C.R. did NOT write.

mrmando wrote:
: That's the whole bloody point. In the film, the Backson is imagined neither by A.A. nor by C.R., but by Owl. This is not Owl's story; Owl is a character, not a narrator; what gives Owl the power to bring the Backson to life?

Well put. I guess, extrapolating from comments already made in this thread, that Jeff would say that C.R. gave Owl that power. Or that A.A. gave C.R.-the-character the power to give Owl that power. Or something like that.

[SDG]

mrmando, on 05 September 2011 - 06:25 PM, said:

Well, we can definitively say that the real Christopher Robin Milne did not have a stuffed Owl or a stuffed Rabbit.

Of course, we can't know with certainty whether C.R. in the book does or doesn't have any stuffed toys at all, other than Edward "Winnie-ther-Pooh" Bear, who is the only animal that appears outside of the Hundred Acre Wood as well as inside it.

By some law of economy, I find it simplest to consider "C.R.-in-the-book-outside-the-Hundred-Acre-Wood" to be essentially identifiable with the "real C.R." That is, when A.A. describes Edward Bear coming down the stairs bump-bump-bump behind C.R., the stairs in question are the real stairs in the Milne house where C.R.'s real bedroom is, along with all of C.R.'s real toys. Unless A.A. introduces some obvious fictionalization into that house, or into the characterization of himself or C.R.-outside-the-Hundred-Acre-Wood, it seems to me gratuitous to carve out hypothetical fictional space around A.A.'s outside-the-Hundred-Acre-Wood narration, whereby C.R.-outside-the-Hundred-Acre-Wood might have a more parsimonious collection of stuffed animals than the "real C.R."

In any case, I have no trouble identifying Eeyore, Kanga, Roo etc. in A.A.'s stories as anthropomorphized and imaginative extensions of C.R.'s real toys, whereas Rabbit and Owl are wholly imaginary animals without similar nursery-toy origins -- and the Disney filmmakers, given the seams and such previously noted, seem to be operating on the same assumptions. So my earlier analysis stands.

Edited by SDG, 05 September 2011 - 09:38 PM.

[mrmando]

SDG, on 05 September 2011 - 08:18 PM, said:

In any case, I have no trouble identifying Eeyore, Kanga, Roo etc. in A.A.'s stories as anthropomorphized and imaginative extensions of C.R.'s real toys, whereas Rabbit and Owl are wholly imaginary animals without similar nursery-toy origins -- and the Disney filmmakers seem to be operating on the same assumptions. So my earlier analysis stands.

I don't have a problem with your earlier analysis; it is based on Reasonable Assumptions, which will do in a pinch when we can't establish propositions with Absolute Certainty. It still doesn't account for the Backson suddenly putting on flesh and walking among the animals.

[SDG]

Peter T Chattaway, on 05 September 2011 - 08:14 PM, said:

: C.R.'s point of view is emphasized every time they do that live-action prologue/epilogue.

Well, to a point. We see the stuffed dolls, sure; but the prologue/epilogue in these films generally centres on a book, which C.R. did NOT write.

The prologue/epilogues involve a room, stuffed animals, and a book that C.R. did not write, but which was read to C.R., and is opened to us and expanded upon in ways very much like C.R. might have imagined while his father told him stories or read to him.

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: That's the whole bloody point. In the film, the Backson is imagined neither by A.A. nor by C.R., but by Owl. This is not Owl's story; Owl is a character, not a narrator; what gives Owl the power to bring the Backson to life?

Well put. I guess, extrapolating from comments already made in this thread, that Jeff would say that C.R. gave Owl that power. Or that A.A. gave C.R.-the-character the power to give Owl that power. Or something like that.

The Backson is initially conceived authorially by A.A. (as a nonexistent creature in an imaginary world) and diegetically by A.A.'s Owl (as a potentially real creature in A.A.'s fictional world). He is imagined, perhaps, first of all by the real C.R. listening to the real A.A. (perhaps initially not entirely sure that there is no Backson even in the world of the story), and later by countless real children reading or being read to from A.A.'s stories (ditto).

He is then visualized by the Disney filmmakers developing A.A.'s story (first of all reading it, with an eye, we may hope, to how they had been read by generations of readers), and diagetically in the film world by the Disney filmmakers' Owl, a creature who is based on A.A.'s and C.R.'s imagination and on the stories as told by A.A. to C.R. and read by countless readers since.

Finally, in a jokey postscript, the Backson is depicted by the Disney filmmakers as a real creature within the world of the story -- a story in which characters have all along been conspicuously interacting with a narrator and with the physical environment of their own storybook context, with letters and words and paragraphs and a spine of a book as real as objects in their own world. The diegetic blurriness of the story is well established, going back to Disney's earliest Pooh cartoons and to a degree to the original A.A. stories.

In short, the movies have made no secret of the fact that they depict characters who exist simultaneously as (a) anthropomorphic animals living in a Hundred Acre Wood, [b.] anthropomorphized versions of stuffed animals in a boy's bedroom, and © characters in a storybook being read by a narrator to a putative listener. The role of the listener's imagination as well as that of the author in the visualization of the stories is not a far-fetched consideration.

mrmando, on 05 September 2011 - 08:30 PM, said:

I don't have a problem with your earlier analysis; it is based on Reasonable Assumptions, which will do in a pinch when we can't establish propositions with Absolute Certainty. It still doesn't account for the Backson suddenly putting on flesh and walking among the animals.

See above. Hope that helps.

P.S. Aside to the admins: If we could kill this smilie forever ------------> <------------ I don't think anyone would cry. How many (a) item, ( item, © item lists have been marred by this automatic character parsing?

Edited by SDG, 05 September 2011 - 09:28 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

SDG wrote:
: Finally, in a jokey postscript, the Backson is depicted by the Disney filmmakers as a real creature within the world of the story . . .

So you concur, then, that the Backson has nothing to do with Christopher Robin, and more or less purely represents an intrusion of the Disney filmmakers (with all their Americanisms) upon the (otherwise essentially British) story.

[SDG]

Peter T Chattaway, on 05 September 2011 - 08:47 PM, said:

: Finally, in a jokey postscript, the Backson is depicted by the Disney filmmakers as a real creature within the world of the story . . .

So you concur, then, that the Backson has nothing to do with Christopher Robin, and more or less purely represents an intrusion of the Disney filmmakers (with all their Americanisms) upon the (otherwise essentially British) story.

I am saying that within the blurry diegesis of Disney's Hundred Acre Wood -- a world in which C.R.'s boyhood fancies and nursery friends, his father's oral and subsequent authorial shapings for C.R.'s benefit and C.R.'s appropriation of his father's work, the subsequent interactions of innumerable adult readers and young listeners, the adaptive efforts of previous Disney filmmakers, and the work of the present filmmakers all come together to form a deliberately hodgepodge world without hard and fast diegetic boundaries -- once a putative creature like the Backson has been proposed and visualized, it is not surprising to find the creature himself putting in an appearance ... and that, once he appears, the creature's own roots are as blurry as those of the world he inhabits.

Having said that, I agree that the presentation of the Backson as he actually appears, including his Americanness, does flatten the diegesis somewhat and sharpens the focus on the contributions of the current Disney animators. And yes, I can agree that tends to weaken the effect of the film as a whole, so that like Jeff I would prefer that the tag had been omitted rather than included.

But a preference of this level would not motivate me to carry out so fierce a campaign (against a post-credits sequence, remember) as has been carried out, so as to elicit so overdeveloped a defense as has now been rendered.

Edited by SDG, 05 September 2011 - 09:47 PM.

[mrmando]

If the Backson [a] exists; [b] matches Owl's description in terms of appearance; and [c] behaves, at least in part, as described by Owl, in that it will follow a trail of items left by other animals ... we have to conclude that Owl has actually seen the creature and stuck around long enough to observe some of its habits, although he's mistaken about its temperament. His tale then becomes a matter of slander against a real creature he doesn't quite understand, rather than a whole-cloth fabrication. SDG, are you saying you don't have a problem with that? And again, the plot in the film's second half is driven by the whole pack of animals being too stupid to distinguish "BACK SOON" from "BACKSON," rather than being misled by C.R.'s spelling error. Are you equally satisfied with both scenarios?

In the Milne books, when Woozle/Wizzle/Backson are discussed, they turn out to be figments of the animals' imagination, and the animals feel foolish afterward for having gotten carried away. (In the case of the Heffalump, Piglet imagines seeing one and feels foolish afterward, but Christopher Robin begins the story by saying that he has seen one. We don't know for sure whether said Heffalump exists in the Hundred Acre Wood, or whether, perhaps, C.R. saw one on a trip to the zoo, in a dimension where the H.A.W. animals cannot go, and from which they needn't fear any incursions by Heffalumps.) Anyhow, all the clues we have in the books suggest that A.A. intended all of these imaginary beasts to be nothing more than chimerical, from the animals' point of view. There are absolutely no clues, at any point, to suggest that the beasts are actually real, or that it's reasonable for the animals to think that they are.

Edited by mrmando, 06 September 2011 - 12:52 AM.

[SDG]

[quote name='mrmando' date='05 September 2011 - 11:45 PM' timestamp='1315277112' post='258873']If the Backson [a] exists; [b] matches Owl's description in terms of appearance; and [c] behaves, at least in part, as described by Owl, in that it will follow a trail of items left by other animals ... we have to conclude that Owl has actually seen the creature and stuck around long enough to observe some of its habits, although he's mistaken about its temperament. His tale then becomes a matter of slander against a real creature he doesn't quite understand, rather than a whole-cloth fabrication.[/quote]
I'm pretty sure that this doesn't follow within the interpretive framework I've proposed.

[quote]And again, the plot of the film's second half is driven by the whole pack of animals being too stupid to distinguish "BACK SOON" from "BACKSON," rather than being misled by C.R.'s spelling error. Are you equally satisfied with both scenarios?[/quote]
Either C.R. made an elementary spelling mistake or Owl made an elementary reading mistake. Is it a huge deal which is the case? Not really. I have a slight preference for the first scenario, mostly because it's what A.A. wrote. I wouldn't make a big thing of it one way or the other.

In the Milne books, when Woozle/Wizzle/Backson are discussed, they turn out to be figments of the animals' imagination, and the animals feel foolish afterward for having gotten carried away. (In the case of the Heffalump, Piglet imagines seeing one and feels foolish afterward, but Christopher Robin begins the story by saying that he has seen one. We don't know for sure whether said Heffalump exists in the Hundred Acre Wood, or whether, perhaps, C.R. saw one on a trip to the zoo, in a dimension where the H.A.W. animals cannot go, and from which they needn't fear any incursions by Heffalumps.) Anyhow, all the clues we have in the books suggest that A.A. intended all of these imaginary beasts to be nothing more than chimerical, from the animals' point of view.[/quote]
What I've been saying for some time is that the animals' point of view is not the only one at work in Disney's Hundred Acre Wood, and that this is the case long before the credits roll on Winnie the Pooh.

Edited by SDG, 05 September 2011 - 10:02 PM.

[mrmando]

And what Peter and I are saying is that we don't find unfettered "diegetic blurriness" to be an attractive quality in either films or books. Perhaps 10% of the blurriness in the film, at most, could be traced back to Milne. The rest has been picked up, snowball fashion, by the Disney-Poohp juggernaut as it rolls merrily along. In a world where there are no rules and anything can happen, we have no reason to expect any particular thing either to happen or not to happen, nor have we any cause to be surprised at what does or doesn't happen; consequently we get frustrated and bored pretty quickly, or at least I do.

In Milne's world, the animals have their own mythology. They're allowed to possess Expansive Imaginations, to Dream Big, even if it gets them into embarrassing situations. In Disney-Poohp, the Big Dreams have to be literalized for some reason, at which point they cease being dreams at all.

Edited by mrmando, 06 September 2011 - 03:16 AM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

SDG wrote:
: But a preference of this level would not motivate me to carry out so fierce a campaign (against a post-credits sequence, remember) as has been carried out, so as to elicit so overdeveloped a defense as has now been rendered.

Ha! So it's the fierce campaign's fault that you overdeveloped your defense?

I'm tempted to go back through the thread to see who got fierce/overdeveloped first, but I tend to get bored with discussions like this once they start staring at their own navel -- once they become about the discussion and not about the thing being discussed -- so I won't.

mrmando wrote:
: In Milne's world, the animals have their own mythology. They're allowed to possess Expansive Imaginations, to Dream Big, even if it gets them into embarrassing situations. In Disney-Poohp, the Big Dreams have to be literalized for some reason, at which point they cease being dreams at all.

Yep. Like I say, the post-credits sequence in this film is indistinguishable from Pooh's Heffalump Movie, on that level. Though I do grant that the post-credits sequence in this film is a heck of a lot briefer and less integral to one's appreciation of the film, given that it appears after the credits etc.

[mrmando]

I think we're all in agreement, at least, in wishing that the post-credits sequence hadn't been included in Winnie-the-Pooh. The problem, however, with dismissing it as just a jokey coda is that, as Peter says, what it does to the Backson has already been done to the Heffalumps over the course of an entire film. I'd say it's just this film's most egregious example of lazy screenwriting (though far from the only one).

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Though I do grant that the post-credits sequence in this film is a heck of a lot briefer and less integral to one's appreciation of the film, given that it appears after the credits etc.

Which only serves to underscore the idea that it's lazy screenwriting. What sort of writers add a completely unnecessary coda that undermines several of the film's premises? Writers who don't care whether the story hangs together and honors its source material or not, evidently.

SDG does an admirable job of [A] tracing the gradual erosion by Disney of the Pooh stories' diegetic integrity over the course of several films, to the point where one cannot even appeal to that integrity as a reason not to include the thoroughly goofy Backson sequence. Yet on the other hand, he still wishes to maintain that [B] these films' source material has been monkeyed with far less than the source material of any other Disney film. I rather think that SDG's vigorous arguments for [A] have somewhat weakened his arguments for [B]!

Edited by mrmando, 06 September 2011 - 04:02 AM.

[SDG]

Peter T Chattaway, on 05 September 2011 - 11:59 PM, said:

: But a preference of this level would not motivate me to carry out so fierce a campaign (against a post-credits sequence, remember) as has been carried out, so as to elicit so overdeveloped a defense as has now been rendered.

Ha! So it's the fierce campaign's fault that you overdeveloped your defense?

What I mean is that when critics make mountains out of molehills, mountains must be moved to put them back into perspective. It is a lot of effort on both sides for a few molehills.

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: In Milne's world, the animals have their own mythology. They're allowed to possess Expansive Imaginations, to Dream Big, even if it gets them into embarrassing situations. In Disney-Poohp, the Big Dreams have to be literalized for some reason, at which point they cease being dreams at all.

Yep. Like I say, the post-credits sequence in this film is indistinguishable from Pooh's Heffalump Movie, on that level. Though I do grant that the post-credits sequence in this film is a heck of a lot briefer and less integral to one's appreciation of the film, given that it appears after the credits etc.

While I can appreciate this, and even agree to an extent, let's not forget that the Hundred Acre Wood was all a "dream" in the first place. Hence the diegetic blurriness that Mando objects to.

mrmando, on 06 September 2011 - 12:24 AM, said:

SDG does an admirable job of [A] tracing the gradual erosion by Disney of the Pooh stories' diegetic integrity over the course of several films, to the point where one cannot even appeal to that integrity as a reason not to include the thoroughly goofy Backson sequence. Yet on the other hand, he still wishes to maintain that [B] these films' source material has been monkeyed with far less than the source material of any other Disney film. I rather think that SDG's vigorous arguments for [A] have somewhat weakened his arguments for [B]!

I don't disagree that the diegetic blurriness further blurs the fidelity to Milne. I can still accept it as honoring Milne's work, in fugue-like variations as it were.

[mrmando]

SDG, on 06 September 2011 - 07:32 AM, said:

While I can appreciate this, and even agree to an extent, let's not forget that the Hundred Acre Wood was all a "dream" in the first place. Hence the diegetic blurriness that Mando objects to.

I don't object to it in Milne. Fantasy must by definition employ a diegesis that's a bit soft around the edges, and Milne's shows its seams deliberately, as it were. The few objections one might raise are easily dealt with.

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I don't disagree that the diegetic blurriness further blurs the fidelity to Milne. I can still accept it as honoring Milne's work, in fugue-like variations as it were.

Milne's work is delicate, subtle, and occasionally profound, crafted with a playwright's extraordinary insight into personalities and motivations. Disney's turgid lump of filmmaking has had all those qualities boiled right out of it. If you listen to Vaughan Williams' "Variations on Dives and Lazarus," you'll note that he resists the temptation to bury the original tune under a Dixieland tuba solo or start quoting "Three Blind Mice" along with it.

[SDG]

I have heard some nice tuba parts in fugues. I don't even have a problem with "Three Blind Mice."

[mrmando]

If you're trying to say it's just a matter of taste ...

Stupid, desperate, cowardly characters are inferior to humble yet capable characters; order is superior to chaos; imagination is superior to lumpen literalism; demonstrating a moral or lesson, diegetically or mimetically, is superior to simply telling it didactically.

[SDG]

I am chagrined that you are driven to such ugly adjectives to describe such a gentle and charming film. We are not talking about Babe: With a Vengeance here. This is not a discussion I have the heart to continue.

Edited by SDG, 06 September 2011 - 11:33 AM.

[mrmando]

When one constructs an overdeveloped defense, one should hardly be chagrined to see the big guns come out. But if you're retiring from the field, I guess I'll have to do likewise.

[SDG]

mrmando, on 06 September 2011 - 11:53 AM, said:

When one constructs an overdeveloped defense, one should hardly be chagrined to see the big guns come out. But if you're retiring from the field, I guess I'll have to do likewise.

You may have missed my mountains and molehills comment earlier. I was okay dealing with the big guns that occasioned the overdeveloped defense, although I felt we were both being a little silly. I don't care to wage a scorched earth campaign, though.

Edited by SDG, 06 September 2011 - 12:04 PM.