Family Home Theater

Grade:  B+
Entire family:  Yes (but mostly for young ones)
1977, 74 min., Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  1.66:1
Featured audio:  DEHT 5.1
Bonus features:  C-
Includes:  Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Copy
Trailer

Watching The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is kind of like riding on “It’s a Small World” at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. It’s a ride obviously designed for families with small children, but many adults seem to enjoy it as well. However, if you position yourself atop the bridge and watch the little boats return, you’ll see by the faces of the older children that they’re reluctant passengers. So it will be with The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

Though Milne said he wrote not for children but for the child within us all, Disney’s “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” is clearly designed for very young viewers, as the bonus features (get up and march along or bounce along) attest. And Pooh is a kinder, gentler cartoon than anything older children are accustomed to seeing on television.   More

Grade:  B-
Entire family:  Yes (but mostly for young ones)
2002, 72 min., Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  16×9
Featured audio:  DTS-HD MA 5.1
Bonus features:  D
Includes:  Blu-ray, DVD, Digital Copy
Trailer

Return to Never Land played in theaters in 2002 rather than going direct-to-video—an indication that Disney thought more highly of this sequel than some of their others. But it’s so similar in structure that if you’ve recently seen the original 1953 animated Peter Pan, you may wonder why this film was even made.

Instead of Wendy being the skeptic, it’s her teenage daughter, Jane, who finds Mother’s stories of Never Land juvenile and utterly inappropriate, given historical events. It’s around 1940, the men have gone off to war, and the young children are being shipped to the country to protect England’s investment in the future. Jane’s siblings are already out of the picture when she is swept away to Never Land, where she discovers it’s all real and learns a lesson about belief.

But there’s one important difference:  Return to Never Land is a much lighter, brighter film.  Instead of a ticking crocodile in pursuit of Captain Hook, it’s an octopus that’s rendered more comically. Hook is up to his hostage-taking ways again, trying to lure Pan to his demise, and once again he’s foiled. But there’s not the same dramatic intensity here. There’s also less emphasis on the Lost Boys being orphans and needing a mother, so there’s correspondingly less potential trauma for young viewers susceptible to separation anxiety. Pan’s resistance to growing up is hardly an issue. Likewise, Tinker Bell is less jealous and malevolent this time around, a much softer character—as if the studio was laying the groundwork for the Tinker Bell Pixie Hollow series that would be launched six years later. And thankfully missing from Never Land this time around are the less-than-politically-correct (“Uggh”?) Indians.  More

Grade:  A-
Entire family:  Yes
1979, 95 min., Color
Rated G
Disney
Aspect ratio:  1.85:1
Featured audio:  DTS-HD MA 5.1
Bonus features:  C+
Includes:  Blu-ray, Digital Copy
Trailer

I watched The Muppet Movie with my ‘tween daughter last night and we both were apprehensive. We had gone to Disney’s Hollywood Studios earlier in the summer and were totally unimpressed with “The Muppets 3D” attraction—a 3D movie that frankly wasn’t worth the long wait. The jokes were bad, the puppetry was only so-so, and the script was as ordinary as a called strike in baseball.

But it’s hard not to warm to a film that begins with Kermit the Frog strumming a banjo on a log in the swamp and singing “Rainbow Connection,” the Oscar-nominated song from Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher (who wrote the other seven songs in this film as well). And when Kermit decides to leave the bayou and we see his long, fuzzy green legs pedaling a bicycle down the road, we both laughed out loud. We were hooked.  More