DVDizzy Forum

jade wrote:When TMAWP came out how many outside musicians did Disney bring in to do songs?

I'm not a fan of Zooey's voice in general which also annoyed me.

Q: You got to work on the latest Winnie the Pooh film in 2011. You co-directed this with Don Hall. With this project, what was the original pitch?

Stephen Anderson: Basically, John Lasseter called Don Hall and myself into his office and said "Hey, the company really wants to bring Winnie the Pooh back in a big way and they want to kick off with a movie here in animation. A hand-drawn Winnie the Pooh movie. What do you think?" We were both really psyched about doing that. The idea was 'let's return Winnie the Pooh back to his roots'. Half of that being his A.A. Milne roots from the books and the other half being his Disney animation roots. But then 'let's also try to find a way to make it contemporary'.

Q: What were your next steps immediately after Meet the Robinsons?

Stephen Anderson: I went back into development and developed a few ideas which didn't get a lot of traction. About a year after that, John Lasseter called me in his office and said 'Hey, Bob Iger has this initiative that he wants to do with Winnie the Pooh. They want to bring Winnie the Pooh back into the company in a really big way and take Winnie the Pooh out of the nursery'. The initiative was 'lets bring Pooh back to all the different divisions: parks, theatrical, consumer products, everything, but let the first step be a movie from Feature Animation'. That's when myself and my friend Don Hall got the invitation to direct Winnie the Pooh.

However, initially it wasn't going to be a feature. We were going to do a handful of shorts. Both Don and I read all of the Pooh stories, we picked out our favorites, and made a shortlist of like 5 or 6 of them that we really liked and started boarding those. When the decision was made to do a feature, we looked at all those stories and said 'is there a way to thread them all together and keep those story ideas, but give it an overarching narrative?' We did end up trimming out at least two of the stories to fit it in to the...'cause we were also given a shorter running time, for many reasons. I think the audience for Winnie the Pooh doesn't want to see a two-hour Winnie the Pooh movie and then also to keep cost down and make it a little leaner, simpler production which we were all for. So, we did pare some of it away. The process was less about expanding on the original pitch and more about trimming things away, so we had enough time to live with the moments and feel that pacing without having to rush through a lot of different story elements that probably didn't all need to be there. It was more about scaling back as the story developed.

Mattinson, the last animator working at Disney to have worked with Walt and who worked on the original The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, was working on a sketch that was related Winnie the Pooh. Hall and a couple of other animators were so in love with his sketch that they encouraged him to draw a storyboard. Mattinson obliged and pitched a storyboard to Lasseter involving Eeyore losing his tail and the gang trying to find a replacement. They hoped Lasseter would like enough that it would get greenlight as a short or maybe even a TV special, but Lasseter ended the meeting with one simple question: “Can you give us a feature?” That, said Hall, was how Winnie the Pooh got started.

Tangled wrote:I can't believe it's been five years since then. So much has changed

unprincess wrote:I couldnt watch the whole thing b/c I dont have a FB account... I wonder if theyre just trying to keep the hand-drawn animators busy with all these vids...

Q: How did you discover Bobby and Kristen Lopez?

Stephen Anderson: Disney Animation has a music department and at the time, the animation music producer was Tom McDougall. The company's overall music producer was Chris Montan. Tom was his right-hand man. They were always giving us ideas for score composers and songwriters depending on what movie it was and Tom McDougall would always make these mixed CDs of different artists to inspire you and sometimes introduce you to people you might not even know, but might be really great or people that have come to Disney and expressed interest in writing for Disney someday. So, they gave us a a list of composers for Winnie the Pooh. Bobby and Kristen were on there. We knew of Bobby Lopez from Avenue Q. Book of Mormon had not come out yet, but he was working on that. So, that still had not hit, but certainly Avenue Q was a great calling card for Bobby. Myself and my directing partner Don Hall picked three songwriting duos from the list that they had given us and we had this little song bake-off. We gave them a moment in the movie and each of those songwriting teams wrote a demo for that song. They were all fantastic, but Bobby and Kristen's was perfect. That song ended up being the honey dream song "Everything Is Honey" that's in the final movie. That was the song they wrote. So, it was definitely a no-brainer picking them because of that, but also because they had musical theater experience and such a great sense of humor too and could take Pooh seriously, but also not take it too seriously. So, they came on, they wrote our songs, and we had such a great time working with them.

Q: Here's a question about the 2011 Winnie the Pooh. Why was Gopher and Lumpy the Heffalump left out of the film?

Stephen Anderson: Just a choice we made.

This film progression from Winnie the Pooh will take you on a grand adventure starting with the story sketch, layout, rough animation, clean-up, and final color.

Travel to the Hundred Acre Wood with production art from Winnie the Pooh.

Don Dougherty wrote:During the development of the Winnie the Pooh movie 2011 we explored the idea of searching for a character named 'Small'. A beetle from Milne’s writings. A fantasy song sequence was considered where Pooh and gang were shrunk to insect size.

Stephen Anderson wrote:Here is a panel from a deleted song from 'Winnie the Pooh' called 'Have You Met Small?' Rabbit’s intro to Pooh of his best friend Small, the beetle.

Stephen Anderson wrote:That bug is named Small. He is one of Rabbit’s friends and relations from the original A. A. Milne books. The artwork is for a deleted storyline from our 2011 Pooh movie where the gang goes in a search for Small, who’s gone missing.

Stephen Anderson wrote:Here are some of my story sketches for the intro of Small the beetle. Rabbit even sung a song called ‘Have You Met Small?