Re-Booting Winnie the Pooh

Evidently picking up on the fact that their attempts to take the world of Winnie the Pooh and make it ‘hip and happening’ (hel-loooo My Friends Tigger and Pooh) didn’t quite achieve the heights they had hoped, the Walt Disney Company is going back to the drawing board — literally — with A.A. Milne’s famous franchise. To that end, Disney has announced that a brand-new 2D feature-length animated film, titled simply Winnie the Pooh, is scheduled for release in July of 2011. And Disney is bringing out the big guns for this project: Among the animators working on the film are Mark Henn (“Princess Tiana”) for Pooh, Andreas Deja (“Scar”) for Tigger, Glen Keane (“The Beast”) for Christopher Robin, and Tony Bancroft (“Pumbaa”) for Eeyore. Burny Mattinson, who was actually an animator on the original 1960’s Winnie the Pooh shorts, will serve as the film’s lead story artist. And here’s an amusing note: The songs for the new film were written by Robert Lopez, who wrote the lyrics for Avenue Q.