Playdate with Winnie the Pooh

My 3 year old loves it. The music is tolerable and the animation is actually impressively rendered with lots of textures and a nice stop motion aesthetic.

The episodes are short (2 minutes) so my only qualm is on Disney plus it is not strung together as one longer program but as many individual episodes. The theme song / credit interludes get tedious.

I was astonished to find so many angry reviews from *ahem* adults complaining about a toddler snow. It "Ruined" Pooh Bear!? Pu-lease. Not every program will be tailored to you and I'm sure there will be more Pooh Bear in the future that fits the "classic" vibe you seem to be pining for. To see so many of these aggressive reviews from adults on a show aimed at kids...pathetic.

I've personally never watched Winnie the Pooh growing up because I could never get into it. My SO did though and even then I feel we enjoy it more than our little one :) I feel it teaches some pretty good lessons fairly quickly, such as conquering fears or having to calm down before doing a certain task (at least that's what I gathered from them and what I've been teaching my girl). I just wish they were a bit longer and had a thicker plot but other than that I think it's a really cute art style and a pretty good way to keep the younger gens. Interested in things from our pasts. We're all looking forward to the newest episodes as the songs are fairly catchy :)

It seems ALL of the negative reviews are comparing this to older Pooh projects. You can't. This is something different. This is directed at toddlers, and for that this is as good as it gets. Lessons are great. The art is unique. The voice actors are actual kids, which always connect with kids more than adults pretending to be kids.

My only (yes, only) complaint is that the episodes are far too short. Not sure what their reasoning there is, but if these were even 5 minutes it would be better! But full 11 minutes would be great. If this was longer I'd give it 10/10 for sure! But where it stands, 8/10 will have to stay.

Listen, I understand other reviewers' complaints about how much this diverges from the ostensible source material. However, filtered through the lens of how much Winnie the Pooh content Disney has produced over the years, as well as the title's home on Disney Junior, I would argue it's perfectly in line with the Disney Winnie the Pooh brand (even if not the Milne Pooh brand).

I appreciate the digestible 3-minute episodes and I think the decision (with this and the sister show Me & Winnie the Pooh) to teach kids resilience is an excellent one. As a former filmmaker with little experience in animation, I do find the animation quite charming as well. And as far as my kid is concerned, she loves every second of it. I'm also comforted that the worse aspects of the characters' personalities are both toned down and actually celebrated by their friends. Oh, and the music is pretty decent too!

All in all, I highly recommend this for any parent of a tiny human whose first word was Pooh (and not the diaper kind), and obviously for said tiny human as well.

My kids were excited for this to come out only to find that the "episodes" are only two minutes long and Disney disabled the autoplay feature for this series so you have to change the episodes over for them every two minutes which is rather irritating as a busy parent who doesn't want to sit down and watch children's music videos. If Disney enables the autoplay feature for this series that would make a big difference, but the fact they also only put in the effort to make 2 minute long songs for every episode and marketed it as full length episodes just shows how grimmy Disney has become as a company and only helps to highlight them as a cash grab company that doesn't care about putting out quality work anymore. Disney is a dumpster fire trying to burn up everything in sight for a dollar.