Winnie the Pooh soon became one of Disney's most valuable properties, thanks in large part to three 25-minute shorts released between 1966 and 1974. The trio was later edited into the feature-length The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
The three shorts (The Honey Tree, The Blustery Day, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too) have much in common. They were all directed, or co-directed, by Wolfgang Reitherman. They feature the voice talents of Sebastian Cabot as the narrator, Sterling Holloway as honey-loving Winnie the Pooh, Paul Winchell as the energetic Tigger, John Fiedler as the nervous Piglet, and Ralph Wright as the gloomy Eeyore.
As it turns out, and Tigger Too (1974) was made just in time, shortly before Sebastian Cabot had a career-ending stroke at the age of 56. Cabot's droll and mannered English accent made him a great voice actor, though he is most often remembered as the servant in the sitcom "Family Affair".
Despite the success of Mary Poppins, the 1960s and 1970s were not the best decades for Disney animated features. The quality of animation declined, as Xerox technology was employed to reduce costs. It was a far cry from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with its frames drawn strictly by hand.
But the shorts edited into The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh are vastly superior to other Disney features of the era, such as The Sword in the Stone (1963) and Robin Hood (1973), even though those films also had Wolfgang Reitherman in the director's chair. One difference is that Many Adventures is not burdened by a plot. The film can be seen as a series of brief stories that develop the lovable characters, from major (Winnie the Pooh) to minor (Gopher). Not much can be done with Gopher, whose running gag is falling down a hole.
Each of the major characters represent an emotion. Tigger is ecstatic, Eeyore is gloomy, Piglet is fearful, Owl is complacent, Rabbit is frustrated, Christopher Robin is nurturing, Pooh is a glutton. They will never change. Christopher Robin is a post-Victorian Peter Pan, always to remain a boy two years short of puberty.
The formula works, and it works much better than, for example, The Jungle Book, made at about the same time. The shorts are heart-warming, but never quite nauseating, if only because the characters' temporary troubles are more amusing than they should be.
How others will see it. The imdb.com user vote total of 40K is low for a Disney animated feature, but The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has a fairly high user rating of 7.5 out of 10. Interestingly enough, each of the three shorts that comprise the movie have higher user ratings (respectively 8.0, 7.9, and 7.8), probably because it takes a Pooh fan to track them down. Or, perhaps, because one 25-minute short is an easier sit than three in a row.
The middle short, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, won an Oscar for Best Animated Short. The final short, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, was Oscar-nominated in that category but did not win. The Blustery Day is noteworthy for its nightmare sequence featuring heffalumps and woozles out to steal Pooh's honey, reminiscent of the "Pink Elephants on Parade" highlight from Dumbo (1941).