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Piglet's Big Movie

By Jan Stuart | STAFF WRITER

March 21, 2003

(G, for gentle) Move over, Pooh. The little pink guy with the pointy ears and the generous heart takes center stage in a charming Disney- animated ensemble piece inspired by the A.A. Milne stories. Carly Simon contributes the amiable songs. So doggedly nice, it's almost hip. 1:15. At area theaters.

Carly Simon (remember her?) has composed a clutch of lilting and winsome songs for Disney's new Winnie the Pooh spinoff, "Piglet's Big Movie," and that is exactly what songs for A.A. Milne characters should be. The lyrics are all about comfort things - friends, snow, mothers - and as she performs them over the soundtrack with that unmistakably plaintive soprano, you feel wrapped up once more in that maternal embrace that lets you know you are safe and loved.

Safe and loved is what we all want to feel at this particular moment of world hostilities, so the gentle ministrations of "Piglet's Big Movie" just might provide some succor to those beyond its target audience of momlets and kidlets. Speaking as someone who has not visited the planet of Milne in decades, I was pleased to return to a place where words such as "eureka" and "aha" are central to the vocabulary: expressions of discovery and affirmation.

"Piglet's Big Movie" is a laconic patchwork of three of Milne's Hundred Acre Wood stories in which everything and nothing happens. There is little plot to speak of, and in that respect this may be the closest thing to an art movie from the Disney animation team since "Fantasia," minus the trippy experimentation.

Basically, Milne's generous- spirited Piglet is feeling taken for granted by his friends after they leave him out of a collaborative subterfuge to bilk some bees of some honey. (Incongruously, veteran character actor John Fiedler reprises his dubbing role from a 1968 cartoon short, and his high, raspy voice makes the spunky little pig sound like a candidate for Social Security.) After taking refuge from the pursuing bees in Piglet's house, the group (which includes Rabbit, Tigger and Winnie the Pooh) comes upon a scrapbook he has made about each of them, and they embark on a journey in which they find renewed appreciation for their neglected friend.

That's pretty much it. Along the way, Piglet helps Christopher Robin discover the North Pole (a large alpenstock), Piglet engineers a house for Eeyore, the depressed donkey, and Piglet is given a bath by Roo's uber-mom, Kanga, who may be the only mother of a preschooler in the entire world without a trace of irony in her bones.

All of this is accomplished with pleasingly colorful storybook imagery and an absence of frenzy that is refreshing for a good part of the way, but feels a little distracted by the second half. Whenever our attention begins to skitter, Simon chimes in with another musical pacifier and suckles us back into submission.