What if the human boy Christopher Robin had turned his back on his animal friends like Winnie the Pooh, Piglet and Co. and gone his own way into adulthood? The 2018 Disney adventure “Christopher Robin” already addressed the question in a family-friendly way and was based on the tone of the famous book and cartoon templates.
In Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey, however, there’s a much more inscrutable answer to the question. The low-budget production comes across as a genuine horror slasher in which Winnie the Pooh and Piglet have returned to their animal roots in their desperate search for food after Christopher Robin left. They finally leave the once idyllic Hundred Acre Wood behind and spread fear and terror in the midst of the human world with a brutal series of murders…
Since the first “Winnie the Pooh” films from Disney in the 1960s, the franchise has actually been inextricably linked to the mouse studio. “Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey” was not created under Disney’s leadership, after all, they would hardly treat one of their most popular children’s heroes like that. But how could the bloody shocker come about at all?
The magic word is public domain. The brand, which has now belonged to Disney for some time, has its origins in a children’s book series by AA Milne. And in 2022, the copyrights to the very first “Winnie the Pooh” story from the 1920s expired, so that anyone – and thus completely independent of Disney – can use it completely freely for new stories. Filmmaker Rhys Waterfield insisted on this and shot his “Winnie the Pooh” horror version in just two weeks.
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That Disney shouldn’t necessarily be happy about this is certainly not a very bold assumption, especially since the film has already received a lot of attention on the Internet after the revelation of the abstruse premise and the first pictures. But the mouse house probably can’t do much, assuming Waterfield has really stuck to using only elements from the first “Winnie the Pooh” book in his film, as only these are no longer subject to copyright. Popular characters that were added later, such as Tigger, will therefore not be seen in “Blood And Honey”.
This can probably be checked before the end of this year – but when exactly is unclear. “Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey” does not yet have a specific release date for Germany or the USA.
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