(CNN) The live-action "family movie" has become an especially elusive commodity, especially now that every member has distinct programming options on a variety of screens. Disney largely threads that needle with "Christopher Robin," a movie that -- once it gets going -- should entertain kids with the antics of Winnie the Pooh and company, while for parents squiring them, spending time with that beloved, silly old bear is no bother at all. 
 
 Director Marc Forster has an eclectic resume -- including a Bond movie and "World War Z" -- but the key entry for these purposes is "Finding Neverland," his moving 2004 look at Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie. 
 
 Throw in a spoonful of "Mary Poppins" for good measure, and you have "Christopher Robin," which doesn't rise to that level. Yet as with that earlier movie, the universal plot is all about an adult accessing his inner child, having lost touch with that pure, unadulterated side of himself. 
 
 Introduced as a lad cavorting with his plush pals, Christopher is quickly shown getting shipped off to boarding school, growing up into Ewan McGregor and getting married (Hayley Atwell plays his wife, making the most of a relatively small role). 
 
 Now, however, he's got adult-sized responsibilities, which include finding time for his own daughter. Having survived World War II, he's working for a large luggage company, but thanks to his officious boss (Mark Gatiss), faces arduous hours and the unsettling prospect of slashing jobs to make ends meet. 
 
 Read More ||||| The world of Winnie-the-Pooh is given an appealing new spin in “Christopher Robin,” Disney’s latest bid to reassert the relevance of A.A. Milne’s quaint kid-lit icon. On its face, the live-action film comes across as a chance to watch Ewan McGregor infuse an adult, critter-harried Christopher with his sly comedic edge. It’s surprising to see how straight McGregor plays it for director Marc Forster (the J.M. Barrie portrait “Finding Neverland”), allowing the CG-animated Pooh and friends to endearingly steal the show. 
 
 Aside from its title and tweedy period aesthetic, this fictional confection doesn’t have much in common with last year’s indie Milne-and-son biopic “Goodbye Christopher Robin.” Both stories might show us a grown-up Christopher impatient to be done with the old bear’s silliness, but here the issue is something altogether more fanciful than pesky literary legacy. 
 
 McGregor’s character is a beleaguered mid-management drone in post-World War II London, thanklessly toiling for a luggage manufacturer — as opposed to dealing with “baggage,” which presumably would’ve been too on-the-nose. He’s an overly serious sort forever caught between his uncaring boss (Mark Gatiss, the BBC’s “Sherlock”) and his wistfully neglected perfect family. (Underutilized Hayley Atwell, of “Captain America,” seems cast mostly for her period look as Christopher’s wife; Bronte Carmichael is capably cute as the couple’s little girl.) 
 
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 In the midst of Christopher’s latest work crisis, Pooh reenters his life, magically whisked to the city from the Hundred Acre Wood on a particularly rambling honey quest. True to his boyhood promise, Christopher hasn’t forgotten Pooh with time. But he has no time for him, and promptly escorts his old playmate home — a little too comically conspicuously for comfort — so that beans can be counted and ledgers balanced. 
 
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 The lessons McGregor’s stress case learns while off in the countryside are gently predictable: The forest’s gloomy new emptiness directly reflects what Christopher is feeling. He really ought to be spending time with his family at their wood’s-edge retreat, where they’ve reluctantly gone without him. 
 
 What’s so satisfying about these telegraphed messages is the earnest, old-fashioned charm that McGregor and longtime Pooh voice actor Jim Cummings bring to them. The CG animals’ designs even look to E.H. Shepard’s vintage book illustrations as a template rather than previous, sleeker Disney incarnations. 
 
 Meanwhile, voice cast additions such as Brad Garrett and a group of five writers (“Spotlight” filmmaker Tom McCarthy among them) lend the toy menagerie a contemporary flair that’s funny without being obtrusive. When Garrett’s Eeyore mutters, “Don’t get me started,” you don’t want him to stop. 
 
 ★★★ 
 
 CHRISTOPHER ROBIN 
 
 Directed by Marc Forster. Written by Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy, and Allison Schroeder, from a story by Mark Steven Johnson and Greg Brooker. Starring Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett. At Boston theaters, West Newton, suburbs. 104 minutes. PG (action). ||||| Few things will break you out of a rut and get your mind right faster than having a friend you haven’t seen in 30 years show up in your yard, unannounced, without wearing any pants. 
 
 Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) with his long time friend Winnie the Pooh in Disney’s live-action adventure "Christopher Robin." Disney 
 
 Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) with his long time friend Winnie the Pooh in Disney’s live-action adventure "Christopher Robin." Disney 
 
 Piglet, Pooh, Rabbit, Roo, Kanga, Tigger and Eeyore in Disney’s live-action adventure "Christopher Robin." Disney 
 
 Eeyore, Pooh and Piglet in Disneyâ€™s live-action adventure CHRISTOPHER ROBIN. 
 
 Few things will break you out of a rut and get your mind right faster than having a friend you haven’t seen in 30 years show up in your yard, unannounced, without wearing any pants. 
 
 That’s pretty much how Winnie the Pooh operates, though — with a combination of wide-eyed innocence and behavior that would land anyone else in jail or a mental ward — throughout Disney’s “Christopher Robin.” 
 
 It’s a movie every bit as messy as its “hunny”-craving bear, though only somewhat as lovable. 
 
 The titular storybook hero (Ewan McGregor), having grown up and survived World War II since leaving the Hundred Acre Wood for boarding school all those many years ago, is now the harried efficiency manager at a London luggage company. 
 
 His wife, Evelyn (Hayley Atwell), hasn’t seen him laugh in years, and his 9-year-old daughter, Madeline (Bronte Carmichael), is desperately looking forward to a weekend at Christopher’s childhood cottage, where she’ll get to play where he once played before she, too, is shipped off to boarding school. 
 
 Christopher’s boss, however, has other intentions. The company is struggling, and if Christopher can’t come up with a cost-cutting plan to save it over that very weekend, he may not have a job come Monday. 
 
 Just as Evelyn and Madeline are leaving Christopher behind for the country, Pooh (Jim Cummings, in his 30th year of voicing the bear) realizes that all of his friends are missing from the Hundred Acre Wood. Since Christopher Robin has taken on an almost mythical resonance since they’ve seen him, Pooh goes looking for his help — by walking inside a tree and popping out in the middle of London. 
 
 Pooh, along with the primary characters of Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Tigger (Cummings again) and Piglet (Nick Mohammed), are brought to life, seams and all, with a heavy dose of movie magic — and just a touch of creepiness. The initial effect isn’t that far removed from those nightmares where your stuffed animals come alive after you’ve gone to sleep. McGregor is as game as any actor for the role, but given his resume, it’s easy to think the whole talking toys thing is merely a hallucination and you’ve accidentally stumbled into the “Winnie the Pooh”-“Trainspotting” mashup you never knew you wanted. 
 
 Directed by Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland”) from a script by Alex Ross Perry, “Spotlight” Oscar winner Tom McCarthy and Allison Schroeder (“Hidden Figures”), “Christopher Robin” feels like two drastically different movies grafted onto each other. 
 
 Oh, bother. 
 
 For the first hour or more, it’s a somber, artsy meditation on lost childhoods and being outgrown. 
 
 The Hundred Acre Wood is downright gloomy. We first meet Eeyore (a terrific use of Garrett’s laconic baritone) as he’s floating down a stream toward a waterfall, ready to end it all. When Christopher snaps and tells Pooh he hasn’t thought about him since childhood, the response — “We think about you every day,” in Pooh’s doddering-old-man whisper — evokes all of the feels. 
 
 The last half hour or so, though, is a madcap romp through London that’s clearly aimed at the child behind me who’d become so disengaged early on, his dozen or more loud queries sent me scurrying to a faraway seat. 
 
 The end result may be discordant, but both ideas are enjoyably strange. 
 
 “Sometimes when I’m going somewhere and I wait,” Pooh says, doling out some of his famous wisdom, “somewhere comes to me.” 
 
 Given the abrupt change in tone, the makers of “Christopher Robin” didn’t seem to have much faith in where their film was going. 
 
 It’s impossible to tell if somewhere came to them. 
 
 But “Christopher Robin” still is worth “oh, bother”-ing to see. 
 
 Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter. ||||| One of the problems with “Christopher Robin” is right there in the title. Compared to his stuffed playthings, Christopher Robin is the least memorable character in the Hundred Acre Wood-set tales penned by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E. H. Shepard. And we don’t even get him as the imaginative, precocious child overlord of Milne’s stories. Instead, Christopher appears in the guise of 47-year-old Ewan McGregor, a man who, in his own words, has not thought about his old pal Winnie-the-Pooh in thirty years. So why does Pooh, a figment of Christopher’s young imagination, return to him after all these years? Because Disney wants your money, of course. I don’t begrudge their need for greed; I just wish they hadn’t given us yet another movie built on the pseudo-psychological cliché that adults need to reconnect with their childhoods in order to be better adults. 
 
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 After a brief recap of the most famous moments in Pooh’s history, “Christopher Robin” settles into the present day. Pooh and his friends are living their best lives in the Hundred Acre Wood. They have accepted that Christopher has grown up and moved on to London. We see Pooh change from his pajamas into his familiar and very short red shirt (it’s odd that he wears more clothes to bed than he does when he’s roaming the streets, but I digress). Armed with his usual hungry tummy rumble, Pooh sets off to mooch hunny from his friends, only to find that everyone has mysteriously disappeared. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the adult world, we learn that Christopher has grown up, gotten married to a woman named Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and had a daughter name Madeline (a very good Bronte Carmichael). He works a miserable job in Winslow Luggage Factory and is shown to be a World War II veteran. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put violent war footage of the main character into a children’s film must know more about feel-good kiddie films than I do. But again, I digress. 
 
 I dawdle because I don’t want to tell you that Christopher is a rather horrible person. He’s a workaholic who neglects his kid and frowns on any notion of playtime she may be harboring. (His idea of bedtime reading involves history books, not “Treasure Island.”) Despite her pleas, he intends to ship her off to boarding school. Making matters worse, Chris’ marriage is on the rocks because he and Evelyn are not doing that thing I can’t talk about in a review of a children’s movie. Worst of all, the luggage factory is failing financially due to lack of travel after the war, so Christopher must fire a good portion of the factory workers. This last item prevents him from going away for the weekend with his family, who is so used to his broken promises that they don’t even pack him a suitcase. 
 
 For reasons unexplained, Pooh needs Christopher to help him find his friends Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, Owl, Tigger, Kanga and Roo. So when he shows up in London, having gone through Christopher’s tree in the Hundred Acre Wood, his former benefactor thinks he’s losing his mind. Once he’s accepted the situation, however, Christopher Robin sees Pooh as another problem he doesn’t have time to solve. But unlike Paddington Bear (whose movie is one of this year’s best), Pooh isn’t going to last 45 seconds in London. So Christopher Robin has to personally deliver him back to the Hundred Acre Wood, which requires returning to the same old house where Madeline and Evelyn are vacationing. 
 
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 The travel scenes, and the return visit to the Hundred Acre Wood, are pleasant enough, with McGregor doing a fine job of credibly selling the reunion between him and his stuffed pals. Each of your favorite characters is brought to life in special effects I thought looked exceptionally creepy, but your mileage may vary. Their personalities remain intact, and McGregor interacts with each of them with an admirable amount of happiness and joy. 
 
 This joy is short-lived, of course, because adulthood isn’t all fun and games. In fact, it stinks on ice. Christopher Robin has major league problems that the childlike, innocent Pooh and his crew are just not equipped to handle let alone supplement. That’s my biggest issue here. As a kid, the last thing you probably wanted during playtime was for it to be invaded by adults. Even though the characters are pulled into Christopher’s real-life universe, it feels as if reality has invaded the Hundred Acre Wood and sullied it. The film’s Madeline-led climax, a mad race to save Christopher’s ability to fire people, feels like a case where the children have to raise the adults. 
 
 By now, you’re probably saying I should just change my name to OdiEeyore Henderson. And I’m fine with that, because I love Eeyore. He was my favorite character as a kid. My mother used to say I had the hyperactivity of Tigger and the miserableness of Eeyore, which is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me. My partner in attitude is rendered magnificently by the voice of Brad Garrett. As Eeyore, he gets the best lines, which I would expect from a script co-written by misery specialist Alex Ross Perry, and Garrett digs into them with a hilarious mixture of pathos and pessimism. And Jim Cummings’ voice-work as Pooh is also superb, a warm and cozy nostalgic throwback to Sterling Holloway that’s as comforting as Pooh’s favorite food. 
 
 Back in 1991, Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” tried to bring a grown Peter Pan, and all his adult problems, back to Neverland. It was a bad idea despite the fact that Neverland is well-matched with the more messed up parts of the adult male psyche. By contrast, the Hundred Acre Wood—Heffalumps notwithstanding—felt safer and more immune to intrusions from scary adulthood. Even at its most amusing—and there are moments when it is downright hilarious—“Christopher Robin” can’t reconcile its darkness and its light. But if these folks want to write an Eeyore movie that stays firmly planted in the Wood, I’ll be first in line to see it.
– Disney's Christopher Robin sees its adult namesake (Ewan McGregor) reunited with his childhood friend Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings) outside the Hundred Acre Wood and just in time, as life in post-World War II London is pretty gloomy. What critics are saying about Marc Forster's latest: "It's a movie every bit as messy as its 'hunny'-craving bear, though only somewhat as lovable," writes Christopher Lawrence at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. As it meshes "a somber, artsy meditation on lost childhoods" with a second half meant to engage kids, "the end result may be discordant … but Christopher Robin still is worth 'oh, bother'-ing to see," he writes. Tom Russo at the Boston Globe calls it "an appealing new spin" on Winnie the Pooh's world. Appearing much like the vintage book illustrations by EH Shepard, "the CG-animated Pooh and friends… steal the show," he writes, noting the script adds "a contemporary flair that's funny without being obtrusive." "Younger kids might grow a bit fidgety" as the film "gets off to a somewhat slow start," writes Brian Lowry at CNN. Once it gets going, though, it offers "a genuine sweetness" and serves as "a reminder of the simple pleasures of hanging out with family and a talking bear, which, in these frenetic times, is the kind of silliness that's worth savoring." But Odie Henderson could've done without "another movie built on the pseudo-psychological cliché that adults need to reconnect with their childhoods in order to be better adults," especially one led by the Hundred Acre Wood's "least memorable character." "It feels as if reality has invaded the Hundred Acre Wood and sullied it," he writes at RogerEbert.com, giving the film two stars.