IT'S enough to bring out the Eeyore in us all. The Disney Corporation has announced that Winnie the Pooh is about to relegate Christopher Robin, his faithful friend of 80 years, in favour of a six-year-old girl.
For Disney, it is a rebranding opportunity. But for the legions of fans who grew up with AA Milne's whimsical stories, it is nothing short of sacrilege.
It is hardly the first time Disney has outraged Pooh purists, of course. They bought the rights to the Pooh stories and images in 1961. Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and the rest were duly Americanised and their characters changed; the wistful bear of little brain, who was regularly described as "growling", acquired an effete little voice and West Coast perma-cheer.
By the end of the decade the original cast had been augmented by a new character called, with crushing inevitability, Gopher. "The latest stories are just regular American cartoons with Pooh and friends as characters in them," writes one angry blogger. "I have a book where Christopher Robin goes to school, through the Hundred Acre Wood, in an American yellow school bus. Ouch!"
"The charm and flavour is not there in Disney," says illustrator Anne James, whose South Melbourne shop, Books Illustrated, does not stock the Disney versions of Pooh. "The fact that they took it and changed it so drastically means they haven't got a sense of the thing they wanted in the first place." Sadly, she says, many children now know Pooh and his friends only as Disney characters. "Disney overshadows everything else. Their versions are like the sweet biscuit that gets picked up before the dry biscuit."
Lumpy, another new character, was introduced in this year's film, Pooh's Heffalump Movie. In Milne's original story, the Heffalump was a phantom conjured by Pooh and Piglet as they puzzled over footprints in the snow that were, in fact, their own. In the film, Lumpy is a literal baby elephant. And now comes a red-haired girl, quaintly described by Disney's people as "a tomboy", to show that adventures with stuffed toys are not just for boys.
