Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

Winnie the Pooh has always been a favorite of mine. The original stories are in the realm of the Mary Poppins stories, i.e., difficult to translate to film. In this instance, Disney has managed to transfer the charm of the Pooh stories intact to the screen. Winnie is simply adorable as an animated character, and Sterling Holloway gives him the perfect voice. All the other characters are voiced with perfection, too, especially Tigger, who makes his debut in this short film. Tigger almost steals the show from Pooh; when he's onscreen, you don't notice anything else. Sebastian Cabot adds just the right touch as the narrator.

The entire film has the feel of the pink elephant sequence in Dumbo; inspired, creative and unforgettable. During the storm, pages from the book blow away as the wind rises, rain washes text down the page and away into a stream, etc. Everyone should love this adaptation; Disney soon cranked Pooh out as a series, and it got tedious and sloppy. But this early effort is a real masterpiece.

Winnie The Pooh is probably Disney's most successful adapted franchises. Walt sought to do a feature in the early 60s, but decided to dole out adaptations in short subjects, because American audiences were not familiar with the British source material. The first featurette was an excellent introduction which captured the warm nostalgia for early childhood whimsy.

This featurette, the second one, is a more atmospheric, action driven adaptation, which goes back to Disney's earlier filmmaking roots. It almost feels like a Wilfred Jackson directed film overall, with the touch of perilous action and you feel that blustery wind. The sequence with Owls house swaying back and forth and Piglet sliding on the chair out the door and back inside is well executed. It's like Clyde Geronimi's sense of tight comic timing. Both Jackson and Geronimi had left the studio a decade earlier, but their influence is strongly felt in this film.

While the three featurettes that would make up the compilation feature The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh have not been in circulation since the VHS era, it is good to view them the way they were originally released to get a sense on how Americans were first introduced to these timeless characters. Even though the feature was the initial vision. Aside from unique opening and end titles, nothing is missing from the feature.

In the 90s both the compilation feature and the original featurettes were available simultaneously.

This was one of the last animated projects Walt greenlit.

Not surprisingly, this is the one featurette that won an Oscar. The story, pacing, songs, execution, make this the strongest Pooh.

I always like Winnie The Pooh movies,but I really like the older Winnie The Pooh movies.I like the background art and the songs are great!I like the way the story goes because one thing leads to another. I would recommend this movie to children ages 5+ and I would recommend it for a family movie.This movie has the original voices of Winnie The Pooh and Tigger.It is a great film and it made me sing along and laugh.If you like Winnie The Pooh I would recommend this one! because it's full of fun adventures for the whole family to enjoy. It may be an older movie but it is a great one! Actually I prefer the older Winnie The Pooh movies,but I like all the Winnie The Pooh movies!

Disney's track record when it comes to adapting other source material to the screen is mixed, to say the least. But with their adaptaions of Pooh,they succeed marvelously. This short won the Academy Award for Animated Short and it's easy to see why: everything clicks. The voice casting is great, the design is superb, animation is top-notch and the source material is accorded with the respect and affection it merits. By all means, find this and watch it if you can. As of this writing, it is in-print. Most joyously recommended.

Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day was the second part of the 1977 release of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. 'Many Adventures' was probably more crucial to me than I'll ever remember since it was the first film I ever saw, over and over, before I could even speak. Looking back on it, as well as on the film, I realized this entry had the biggest effect on me- it had lots of humor (and some of it still funny, if only in the 'cute' sense), everlasting themes, splendid songs, and Tigger too. But more than anything else I think what was most fascinating about this entry (and possibly what the Academy saw in it to give the film an Oscar) was the dream sequence. I can't really be sure of it, yet on a recent viewing I realized much of what goes into that dream of Helfflumps and Woozles is akin to surrealism (another example could be of the Pink Elephant sequence in Dumbo). For young children it is perhaps the most frightening and intense sequence of the film as a whole (a couple of images from it stayed with me through the years), and that gives it the edge to appeal to older audiences. While I would usually recommend The Many Adventures, if one just wants to see part of the film, this is the one to see. A+ (as much for quality as for nostalgia)