Poorly lit, terribly acted, and mostly unwatchable – Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is an absolute cinematic disaster with a cavalcade of issues. There’s so many simple things done completely wrong in Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s slasher twist on the beloved children’s character.
The glorified student film is bad. Very, very bad. Failing so many fundamentals of filmmaking in just 84 minutes is almost impressive. You could spend probably twice as many words decrying its quality, but instead there is a small spotlight which needs to be shone on the project, and it’s something which will likely be lost for the sequel.
Blood and Honey has two great things in it: cringe-inducing gore, and some highly effective animated sequences which really should’ve been the entire movie. The film’s prologue set a surprisingly high bar that the rest of the film dropped the ball on. The hand-drawn style retelling the tale of Pooh and Piglet’s descent into madness is simplistic but really interesting. It’s probably the only aspect of the film which feels like the meeting between loving craftsmanship, artistic vision, and passion.
Unfortunately, this is shown in the trailers for the film, perhaps giving you the impression there is any artistic value to the film. In reality, the film uses this animation just twice, and leaves you yearning for more as you sit through more incomprehensible story and high school-level acting.
If Frake-Waterfield is out there and looking for ways to improve for the sequel which has already been greenlit, hear us out. Get rid of the benign, soulless slasher elements, and go hard on the animation where there is actually potential. Turning Pooh into a killer should be fun, but it should also be twisted, disturbing, dank, whatever word you like. It shouldn’t feel formulaic and lazy.
Think Coraline instead of Friday the 13th Part V, because what stays with people is discomfort more than just blood and gore. It’s the disturbed feeling. The uneasiness of something shifted ever-slightly wrong. Stephen King describes this as terror in his definition of the three types of horror.
“Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”
Having Piglet rip the shirt of a woman he’s about to kill so the film can have some gratuitous T&A isn’t anything interesting or good. Having a bikini clad babe murdered in a spa isn’t anything original or fun. The animation, though, is something compelling and should hopefully spawn much better parodies now Pooh is in the public domain.
We might be subjected to many, many more of these “beloved children’s character is now horror” stories, but the way they can improve is to actually emulate its original works and their child-like glee associated with animation. What would trip you out and challenge you more as a viewer: Friday the 13th with a guy wearing a Winnie the Pooh mask, or a Disney-esque animation which slowly reveals itself to be a grotesque horror?
Because I sure as hell am not getting challenged by the former.