{"id":625096,"date":"2023-04-03T09:49:01","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T14:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/03\/winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-turned-a-childrens-icon-into-a-murderer-good\/"},"modified":"2023-04-03T09:49:01","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T14:49:01","slug":"winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-turned-a-childrens-icon-into-a-murderer-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/03\/winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-turned-a-childrens-icon-into-a-murderer-good\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey\u2019 Turned a Children\u2019s Icon Into a Murderer. Good"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When the trailer<\/span> for\u00a0Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey<\/em> hit the internet last year, it produced a mild viral hysteria. The angriest Pooh fans accused director Rhys Frake-Waterfield of invading their childhood psyches, the creative equivalent of napalming 100 Aker Wood. When the film was released in theaters, critics mauled it, agreeing \u201cthis Pooh stinks<\/a>.\u201d Others\u201450 percent of the audience on\u00a0Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> and a profitable proportion of\u00a0Mexico<\/a>\u2014appreciated its gruesome absurdity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beneath the opprobrium lies an interesting legal question: How was a filmmaker whose previous movies included\u00a0Croc!<\/em>,\u00a0Dinosaur Hotel<\/em>, and\u00a0Easter Bunny Massacre: The Bloody Trail<\/em> able to twist one of Britain\u2019s most beloved bears\u2014a character associated with Disney for decades\u2014into a honey-dribbling serial killer? The simple answer, of course, is that some of the bear\u2019s copyright protection had expired. But the deeper, subtler point is that\u00a0Pooh flogging Christopher Robin<\/a> with Eeyore\u2019s severed tail is good for the health of creativity in America.\u00a0<\/p>\n

English author A. A. Milne published the first Pooh book,\u00a0Winnie-the-Pooh<\/em>, in 1926. Its forest of cutesy critters was intended, famously, to entertain Milne\u2019s son, Christopher Robin. Disney first began licensing Pooh in 1961, dropping the original hyphens and introducing new characters, like Gopher, who first appeared in\u00a0Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.<\/em> In 2001, the company\u00a0paid $350 million<\/a> for the rights to Pooh. But that first book\u2014which contains 10 stories, including classics in which Eeyore loses his tail and Pooh has an unfortunate bee encounter\u2014entered the US public domain in January 2022, making way for\u00a0Blood and Honey<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Frake-Waterfield explains that making his\u00a0Pooh<\/em> was a two-stage process. First, he could work only from the 1926 book,\u00a0not any of Milne\u2019s three later works (which will trickle into the public domain in the coming years), and certainly not from anything Disney added in its adaptations. So he cleared his mind of Pooh-related childhood memories. He couldn\u2019t use Gopher\u2014or Tigger\u2014and he certainly couldn\u2019t trap victims with a game of Poohsticks<\/a>. Also, the bear had to be naked: It was Disney that decked him out in his delightful red crop top.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On top of all that, Frake-Waterfield had to be careful not to confuse the public. A Chucky-sized \u201clittle menace\u201d of a Winnie that \u201cruns around stabbing people,\u201d in Frake-Waterfield\u2019s words, runs the risk of eliding with Disney\u2019s version. So his Pooh is Michael Myers-sized. To be extra careful, he Googled every detail in his story to ensure he hadn’t committed subconscious plagiarism.\u00a0Blood and Honey<\/em>\u00a0hit theaters in February, and to date he\u2019s heard nothing from Disney about his film.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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