Winnie the Pooh.

I’ve got a new column up on how relievers are overvalued in trades and I appeared on today’s edition of the ESPN Baseball Today podcast.

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We took our daughter to see the new Winnie the Pooh movie on Saturday, as the two original books (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner) are among our favorites. The books are largely sweet and gentle as you might expect given Pooh’s reputation, but there’s a fair amount of dry wit sprinkled throughout the books, with somewhat sharper characters than you might expect if you’ve only seen earlier Pooh films, such as the supercilious Rabbit or the disdainful Eeyore. (Obvious disclaimer: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which is the studio behind this film.)

The movie, produced by Disney Animation Studios (which is, of course, run by two Pixar executives, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter), has the hand-drawn look and feel you’d expect from a Disney film with some nods to the drawing style of Ernest Shepard’s original illustrations. It draws from three stories from the two books – “In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One,” “In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump,” and “In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings” – although only the first one has its story survive the transition more or less intact. The three are intertwined with new elements, including the Jasper Ffordian construct of having the characters interact with the printed words and letters in multiple scenes, in a single story arc that sees Pooh in search of honey for his noisily empty tummy, Eeyore in search of his tail, and all of the animals in the forest setting a trap for a monster called the “Backson” that they presume has kidnapped Christopher Robin. That Backson stands in for the mysterious Heffalump – the “backson” bit in the book was just a misunderstanding of Christopher Robin’s sign, not a creature – but a hint of the grotesque in a song and animation sequence that seems to allude to the interludes like Salvador Dali’s segment in Hitchcock’s Spellbound … or the dream sequence in The Big Lebowski.

Much of the grown-up humor in Milne’s books is in the tone of the descriptive text – it always reminds me a bit of Wodehouse’s style – that might not translate well to the screen, or might leave the movie a bit too sedate if they tried, even with the narration from John Cleese*. To compensate, the movie contains far more physical comedy than the books, including Rabbit (probably the character most changed in appearance from the books) standing in front of a door that is about to be violently opened, with predictable results. But those scenes earned some pretty substantial laughs from the youngest audience members, so they served their purpose even if it occasionally did feel like Bugs Bunny was about to make a cameo.

*It amuses me no end that Cleese, the front man for the greatest and perhaps most subversive comedy troupe in history, has now become a beloved elder statesman, appearing here and as the lead sheep in Charlotte’s Web.

The great strength of the film, though, is the voices. Jim Cummings voices both Pooh and Tigger, giving the latter the same voice he uses for the Disney character Pete while adding Tigger’s trademark lisp, while the former is as good an approximation of the classic Pooh voice as you might find. (And tell me he doesn’t look like a certain GM currently working in Los Angeles.) Craig Ferguson’s Owl is haughty and imperious as Owl should be, but beyond those two Disney stuck with professional voice actors rather than bigger names, such as choosing Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob, for the underutilized Rabbit. The decision points to an emphasis on quality and even legacy over short-term commercial gain; these are iconic characters whom viewers expect to sound and act in certain ways, and it looks like the way to achieve that is to use professional voice actors over celebs.

They did bow to celebrity with the theme song, although if you’re looking for a cute voice you could do a lot worse than Zooey Deschanel, who does two other songs in addition to the classic “chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” tune. The film also features seven original songs by Robert Lopez, co-creator of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, although I’d only call “The Backson Song” memorable.

The film runs a quick 69 minutes and is preceded by the short film The Ballad of Nessie, a very cute take on how the Loch Ness Monster came to be, animated in a distinctly Seussian style. Winnie the Pooh did bother the Milne purist in me for some of the modern flourishes, but judged on its own merits it’s a wonderful film for the preschool (or kindergarten, in our case) set, right up there with My Neighbor Totoro among our favorites.