Christopher Robin – 2018
I’m going to say, right off the bat that this was a very sweet movie, but the visual effects were not as impressive as I wanted them to be. There is no doubt that they were done very well, but they were kind of a one-trick pony. The big effect of the film, which was at its core, just a kid-friendly family drama, was the animated stuffed animals. They looked great, but there really wasn’t much else to look at. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure why this was nominated for an Academy Award.
So I figured I must be missing something. To find out what, I looked up a StudioDaily interview with the film’s visual effects supervisor, Christopher Lawrence, to see what he had to say. I found it interesting that the first question they asked was, ”Why do you think your peers voted to give Oscar nominations for best visual effects to Christopher Robin?” Exactly what I was wondering, myself. His answer was that it was all about the complicated concept of toys coming to life and making them seem real. Also, it was about making their performances subtle; animated without being cartoony. And that was about it. I read the entire interview, and that’s all that was mentioned. So… I didn’t miss anything.
That being said, there is no question, it looked really good. Even though the animated toys were completely CGI, they looked like real toys that were alive. One of the challenges the animators faced was the fact that the stuffed animals didn’t have flesh and skin. They had cloth and fur. That alone made it different than most contemporary efforts of CGI realism, especially when it comes to lighting. It really looked fantastic. The stuffed animal character that got the most praise was Tigger, though I didn’t see how he was any different than Pooh or any of the others. They all looked equally good, and the subtlety of the all emotional performances of the toys was perfectly executed, especially Pooh.
The problem is that once you get used to the effect, you look for something more, and there just wasn’t anything else. The only real variations in the effect was when the stuffed animals were in different environments. For example, when Pooh is walking in the rain, you could see the falling water interact with his fur, or when he is eating honey, getting it all over himself and everything else. Though, even as I was watching the movie, I had to roll my eyes in disbelief. Real honey cannot be cleaned up anywhere near as easily as it was portrayed in the film. But I get it – that’s not the point. The point is how the CGI honey looked matted in Pooh’s CGI stuffed animal fur, and it looked perfectly real.
Of course, there was your standard cadre of green-screened environments that were nice, but nothing to write home about. And there was one very brief scene in which several of the characters are in a trunk being dragged behind a moving truck. The trunk is fishtailing and causing minor chaos in its wake, but again, nothing too difficult or exciting. There just isn’t a lot to comment on. Their one trick looked fantastic, but in the end, it was just one trick.