The Tigger Movie

by Mark Bazer

To begin with the obvious: the most wonderful thing about Tiggers, of course, is that Tigger is the only one! The darn problem, though, is that our bouncerific friend gets it into his addled brain that he needs to find his family. And so he spends most of first-time director Jun Falkenstein's take on A.A. Milne's classic stories bouncing around the Hundred Acre Wood, searching high and low for something even the wee-est pipsqueak in the audience knows just doesn't exist. The frustration and love we all feel for Tigger is profound, however, and his antics keep the film, well, bouncing right along. Now, allowing that I'm no scholar of The Tao of Pooh, it still seems that the rest of the bunch -- Pooh, Kanga, Eeyore, and so on -- belong to a past, slower era. Disney must figure that only the frenetic Tigger and his short attention span can carry a movie these days. Fortunately, Falkenstein mostly stays true to Milne's style -- i.e., Tigger's musical numbers do not include a hip-hop song. And certainly there's always a place for Pooh and crew, as Tigger, inevitably, realizes who his true family is -- even though Winnie couldn't bounce if a pogo stick bit him on his big honey-filled arse.