It seems that every decade or so, the Walt Disney Company takes Winnie the Pooh out of mothballs and takes a flyer in the hopes that a new generation will support it at the movies. These last couple of attempts have not been very successful box-office wise, and in the case of The Tigger Movie, it wasn’t a particular artistic success either. Pitched squarely at the early youth market with only a sideways glance at older kids and adults who might like to revisit the beloved characters for nostalgia sake, The Tigger Movie is singularly unspectacular.
The Tigger Movie (Blu-ray Combo Pack)
Directed by Jun Falkenstein
Studio: Disney
Year: 2000
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 1080p AVC codec
Running Time: 77 minutes
Rating: G
Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 English; Dolby Digital 5.1 Spanish, French
Subtitles: SDH, French, Spanish
Region: A-B-C
MSRP: $ 39.99
Release Date: August 21, 2012
Review Date: August 20, 2012
The Film
3/5
The energetic Tigger (Jim Cummings) is constantly looking for his pals in Hundred Acre Woods to go bouncing with him. Most of them have other things to do and don’t ordinarily bounce anyway, but young Roo (Nikita Hopkins) who does bounce and would love nothing better than for Tigger to think of him as a younger brother tags along hoping to get the message through to the hyperactive cat. But Tigger begins to realize that he’s alone in the world and wonders if there aren’t other members of his family tree someone out there that he can connect with, so he writes a letter to his “family” hoping to get a response. Tigger’s friends band together to write a response that they hope will appease him, but it only convinces Tigger that there are other tiggers out there, and that they’re coming to his welcome party.
Writer-director Jun Falkenstein’s screenplay (story by Eddie Guzelian) manages to work in all of the familiar A. A. Milne characters, but the emphasis is clearly on Tigger and Roo’s growing friendship. There are side trips as each of the friends heads off to help look for Tigger’s family. Naturally, Winnie the Pooh (also Jim Cummings) discovers a honey tree with angry bees that he must contend with and in the movie’s most charming scene sings them to sleep with the sweet tune “Lullabee” while sampling their product (all of the songs in the film were written by Disney’s reliable composers Richard and Robert Sherman). They provide Tigger with an atypical ballad “Someone Like Me” that gets the story rolling, and Tigger also gets a late-film production number “Round My Family Tree” that boasts the best animation in the movie. While the animators have used the same motif for the film as with other Pooh films (storybook pages with drawings which come to life and then take over the screen), the animation doesn’t quite capture the old world animation techniques from the original featurettes. (Last year’s Winnie the Pooh came much closer to the look of the old films than The Tigger Movie does.) It’s a simple if worthwhile theme to the movie: your family doesn’t have to resemble you to be your family as Tigger finally realizes his friends are his family, but even the relatively brief 77-minute running time seems stretched for such an obvious moral.
Jim Cummings comes closer to capturing the vocal cadences of Sterling Holloway’s original Pooh than he does Paul Winchell’s original Tigger, but the fact that he can come as close as he does with each of them is rather remarkable. John Fiedler delightfully reprises his original Piglet, and while Peter Cullen isn’t quite as dourly effective as Ralph Wright was as Eeyore, his deadpan comments are always welcome. John Hurt serves efficiently as the narrator of the film.
Video Quality
4/5
The film has been framed at a 1.78:1 aspect ratio and is presented in 1080p using the AVC codec. The images are bright, but colors are not consistently maintained throughout the film. Tigger’s color in particular goes from pale to bright orange throughout the presentation. Other colors are likewise alternately pastel or more vibrant. Backgrounds maintain more consistency in the pastel range. The lines in the animation stay nicely solid without any noticeable aliasing. There is some slight banding in some backgrounds, but it’s never greatly distracting. The film has been divided into 23 chapters.
Audio Quality
4/5
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sound mix uses the surround channels most often to give the music some spread. There’s also an avalanche late in the film that gets an expansive mix through the fronts and rears and gives the LFE channel something to do. The dialogue has been recorded precisely and has been placed in the center channel.
Special Features
3/5
Unless otherwise noted, the bonus material is in 1080p.
Every time the viewer puts the movie in pause mode, this starts Disney Intermission which is a series of games for youngsters (guess the character being drawn, find differences between two similar pictures).
“A Tigger Tale” is a brief roundtable discussion featuring composer Richard Sherman, director Jun Falkenstein, producer Cheryl Abood, art director Toby Bluth, and animator Jeff Johnson talking about the production of the film. It runs 6 ¼ minutes.
Portions of scenes from all of the Winnie the Pooh animated tales up to the time of The Tigger Movie have been turned into ten Mini-Adventures of Pooh shorts each running about 2 ¾ minutes. The viewer may view them separately or in one 24 ¼-minute cluster.
“Round My Family Tree” sing-along takes the production number from the film and places sing-along lyrics on the screen for families to participate. It runs 2 ¾ minutes.
“Your Heart Will Lead You Home” music video is performed by Kenny Loggins and features clips from the movie. It runs 4 ¾ minutes in 480i.
The disc offers promo trailers for Cinderella and Finding Nemo 3D.
The second disc in the set is the DVD copy of the movie.
In Conclusion
3/5 (not an average)
The Tigger Movie will entertain younger members of the family who particularly enjoy the stories of Christopher Robin and his animal friends, but this particular adventure is not among the best in the Disney/Pooh line-up.
Matt Hough
Charlotte, NC
