Hacker Cinema
Winnie the Pooh
2011 · Film · 63 min
Directed by Stephen J. Anderson, Don Hall
AnimationFamilyAdventureComedy
During an ordinary day in Hundred Acre Wood, Winnie the Pooh sets out to find some honey. Misinterpreting a note from Christopher Robin, Owl convinces Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore that their young friend has been captured by a creature named "Backson" and they set out to rescue him.
3 positive4 negative15 neutralfrom 22 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
22 comments on Hacker News
I've always loved the books. I grew up near Ashdown forest. When I visited the UK again I stayed in Hartfield and went to the little cafe they mention in the article. It was nice, my kids enjoyed it.
I was reminded this year that my Winnie the Pooh is not everyones when someone at work posted a quote that made no sense to me. I read some of the poems Milne wrote, thinking it must be from those. Of course it was just from a more recent Disney movie. It was about being smarter than you think, it made me chuckle anyway because quite a few of the original stories are about what happens when you think you're smart. Milne might not have the best reputation as a good bloke, but his writing about childhood was subtle and grounded.
I feel like winnie the pooh won't lose much from having seen the film version beforehand, but also the books had the kind of whimsical humour that I enjoyed a lot more in college than I did as a kid.
Both of the mentioned movies probably wouldn't have had any problem releasing while the copyright to the characters remained in-tact under fair use. If someone is trying to make a movie with existing well-known characters, people aren't too interested in non-transformative work, and distributors probably wouldn't distribute something due to the general lack of audience interest.
The main benefit that public domain brings to a work is that you can make small edits or changes to a work without violating its copyright. Imagine if you wanted to go through all the episodes of Spongebob, change the colors to make it clearer to watch for colorblind viewers[a], and then sell those edits as a box set or otherwise sell access to them via some accessibility-focused streaming service. Under copyright this would probably not be seen as transformative, and something non-transformative then has an incredibly high bar to clear for fair use to apply to it.
I also think that making new episodes that aren't super transformative would probably not have met the burden for Fair use: for example, making a new episode of Popeye that otherwise follows the same script beats as existing episodes would probably be seen as copyright infringement by the courts. However, once you get into the territory of making a sequel/prequel movie where you really flesh out his character, it starts getting into the realm of qualifying for transformative under fair use (depending on how the judge sees it).
But the mentioned movies really seem like they're so different from the source material. For Pooh Blood and Honey, it doesn't affecting the market for the original, given the works are so different in what they do (and there is likely 0.1% or less overlap between the audience of the slasher genre and the children's programming genre cohort), it did not use almost any of the original copyrighted works to tell its story, just its characters, and the content is transformative enough to where it's not like it's just another episode of Winnie The Pooh.
This popeye film seems to use the same approach as Blood and Honey: it's just Popeye killing people with stuff like "look, it's the Spinach from the original episodes!".
a: not sure if this would actually be beneficial, but it's the best example I can think of for a barely-transformative work other than putting sunglasses on the characters' faces or putting Subway Surfers next to it.
Looking forward to a brief rush of editorial cartoon-level works doing absolutely nothing not already covered by parody or fair use. Maybe a bad horror or porn movie.
Then nothing, just like happened with Winnie the Pooh.
Also he voiced the Backson in a Winnie the Pooh movie. A mysterious creature that had everybody scared out of their wits throughout the show until (spoiler alert) he finally shows up at the end and is the friendliest sounding character you can imagine
https://trademarks.justia.com/search?q=Mickey+Mouse
Here are US trademarks.
The trademark does not stop people from making a cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse, copyright does. We saw this with “Winnie the Pooh”. New horror movie can use the Pooh bear and friends, but can’t use the red shirt as that’s still copyrighted.
Trademark stops people from being able to use the name Mickey Mouse or the stylized type version they trademarked.
> What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?
You're not very good at arguing your case. I see where you're trying to go with this, but that analogy sucks.
Look, Disney just ruins everything. I grew up with the A.A. Milne books for Winnie the Pooh. As a child, I had a picture in my mind for all of the characters, appearance, voice, manner. Disney's Winnie the Pooh is not it, and they have such cultural dominance that their vision can seem to overwrite the original.
I've had to just learn to not sweat it. Blade Runner 2049? Excellent movie, but I do not consider it canon. The original had a sense of humor and hopefulness that 2049 just absolutely lacked.
My Disney+ shows that I'll have access to Pinocchio on September 8th. Not sure if you have already seen it, but if not, give it a watch with an open mind. You might like it.
When you can't even watch Winnie the Pooh in China because your petty dictator has a complex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTK9x4baQY8
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi
Petty. Dictator.
Winnie the Pooh also comes to mind. There was one beautiful and very authentic animated movie followed by two or three terrible films that just felt like a horrible caricature of anything the original work was about.
There might have existed a moment where every broadcast television signal on Earth was showing John Fiedler (Mr. Peterson on the Bob Newhart Show, Piglet in Winnie-the-Pooh, a thousand other credits). He was everywhere in the same way people make fun of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
For Columbo side-roles, Vito Scotti is a fun one to spot. I think he was in four or five episodes.
I used to be very gung-ho about short copyright periods but my thinking has gotten a bit confused for two reasons:
1. I think there's virtue in limiting the modification --as opposed to the reproduction-- of works for some time after the death of the author. There's something distasteful about thinking of (to the use OP's example) Winnie the Pooh merchandise at Target, or The Winnie Pooh Movie having nothing to do with the "real" Winnie The Pooh. There is some value to the "sanctity" of a work IMHO, for some time.
In other words, avoiding the "dracula-ization" or "frankenstein-ization" (read: "gross commercialization") of works for some time.
That being said, it makes sense for the original, unmodified work, to enter the public domain. I think this is a distinction worth exploring.
2. More controversially, there are some works where there's a credible argument that the author is a "corporation." An example here is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each movie has the imprimatur of the director, but in the aggregate they feel very much "MCU" in style. If anything, the authors seem to be Kevin Feige, Louis D'esposito, and Victoria Alonso.
The characters were originally created by Stan Lee et al, but if Marvel Studios were to create a new character (and make that character a flagship one, etc) that character would genuinely be a corporate creation.
Would love a discussion on these topics.
There are plenty of characters that aren't still under copyright. Sherlock Holmes, Norse and Greek Mythological heroes, Winnie the Pooh (now), most of the fairy tale stories (which Disney used early on) and a huge number of other characters and stories. You are focusing on the small number of popular franchises that are popular because people are creating new content instead of the huge number of stories that are there just waiting for someone to make a movie, video game, etc.
For whatever it is worth, Winnie the Pooh is far from most popular children's books.
It was movies that got super popular and fun to watch. Book is one of those you buy, but rarely read cause neither you nor kid wants it that much.
Winnie the Pooh is an interesting example, because while the first book will be in the public domain, the second book and the Disney films will still be under copyright. So you'd be free to make a story or merchandise based on the original book Pooh, but you can't use the way he looks in the movie, nor can you use Tigger (who doesn't show up until the second book).
A similar thing happened with Sherlock Holmes, where there was a window where you could use Sherlock and his early cases, but you couldn't use details like Watson getting married because the later books were still protected (we might still be in that window, I don't know the publication dates off the top of my head).
My daughter just started getting into Winnie the Pooh shorts and movies, which we're happy to let her watch and rewatch and rewatch, mostly because they don't annoy us. I have no doubt we'll be buying in to disney+ for her to have access to higher quality cartoons.
EDIT: After writing this I realized the parent comment was talking about an episode of South Park from S12, not the recent episode that led to the ban in China. I'll leave this up but read into this with that context!
You should really actually watch the episode. It's a blatant dig at China's government, censorship policies, and treatment of political prisoners. Its treatment of `China invading the US` were not out of `paranoia`, as you say, but based out of reality. It attacks Disney for making similar concessions to the Chinese government in its MCU movies.
Spoilers, but deeper analysis:
Randy's story arc this season appears to revolve around surrendering your morals for the next dollar- for example, last season he turned down a deal with a large marijuana corporation to continue his home-grow operation, but proceeded to create a partnership with them in the season premiere to ensure his stake in South Park's weed market. The scene where he garrotes Winnie the Pooh in this episode, to me, is an extension of this same theme- the sellout of what we've taken as sacred, except now, it's to China's CCP. Contrast that to the name of Randy's farm, which is a bastardization of the word `integrity`.
The entire segment about the band biopic in this episode is basically saying the same thing but far more overtly.
> assume that someone who bans all Winnie The Pooh pictures across a country
I'm not sure if this will change your opinion, but this isn't true.
I asked my friends that are in China now to search for Winne The Pooh on Baidu and Bing, and they were able to find pictures of the character.
The are also Winnie the Pooh cartoons and movies and dolls readily available in China. Along with various merchandise for sale.
So no, it is not banned in China. Neither are time travel movies and TV shows, despite the English news reporting as such.
Artists/protesters don't get 'disappeared' in the US, unlike in China:
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/07/23/chinese-protester-splashed-ink-xi-jinping-poster-sent-psychiatric-hospital-report/
How much 'free speech's is there in a place that bans Winnie the Pooh because of memes:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi
Let's just admit China doesn't have free speech in practice?
We recently listed to the dramatized audio book[1] with the family. It was worlds better than any Disney movie version of the story. The original Milne text plus the all-star British voice actors made it truly enjoyable.
Hallo, Eeyore.
Same to you, Pooh Bear, and twice on Thursdays.
[1] https://www.audible.com/pd/Winnie-the-Pooh-Dramatised-Audiobook/B003IK2NKY
> Heads simply don't have bears on them
Also, humans may refer to other humans as toy-bears and get punished for it (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi). Human language is hard, metaphors are hard.
The latest Winnie The Pooh movie (containing nothing offensive, suitable for children) has of course been banned in China.
I find it amazing how very powerful people can end up with such delicate egos. Here in the West we mock leaders all the time and it rarely undermines their authority.
Interesting. I too have noticed a similar thing as I have aged. I developed the theory though that when it started happening things that did not impact me directly (such as movies) that it was more a case that I was feeling emotional about something else in life and that this was emotions seeping out where they could. I especially thought this because it didn't seem to always happen.
Your view bears merit though and I will have to consider it. Thank you for sharing it.
And my kids still make fun of me for crying at the end of "Winnie the Pooh", but I've always done that. And I maintain that Christopher Robin leaving Pooh and his childhood behind is cry worthy... even more for Pooh than Christopher Robin.