Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree

Winnie The Pooh And The Honey Tree was the first featurette, and it leads off the compilation feature. It begins with a live action look at a child’s bedroom, strewn with stuffed animals. Though the toys are Disney-fied versions, it does nicely get across the origin of these tales. A storybook opens to a familiar rendering of the Hundred Acre Wood, populated by the characters from the stories. The storybook trappings charmingly remain as a motif throughout the stories. Christopher Robin begins swinging from a tree right there on the map, followed by other characters coming to life on the page. Piglet seems oddly unrealized in his brief appearance here, due to the fact that he never appears in the rest of this story and therefore his design had not been as nailed down as it would be in the next featurette. The first of several charming songs from the Sherman Brothers begins, a simple but endearing ditty introducing Winnie The Pooh. The story that follows is by now very familiar to me, going way back to my View Master days, as those View Master reels were my first exposure to this tale. Winnie The Pooh runs out of honey at his home, and using an unusual amount of ingenuity, he borrows a balloon from Christopher Robin. He then rolls himself in the mud to disguise himself as a rain cloud, and then he uses the balloon to climb to a honey tree. The ruse fails, and he is attacked by bees.