What did you think of "The Tigger Movie"?   Good 62% 168   Bad 24% 66   Somewhere in between 2% 5   Haven't seen it 12% 33 Total Votes   272

Verdict: As Tigger himself would say, it's tiggerific.

Details: Animated feature with Tigger, Pooh, Baby Roo, Piglet, etc. Directed by Jun Falkenstein. Rated G. 1 hour, 16 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Because my designated consultants, Malory (age 3 1/2) and Charlie (2 1/2), had to back out, I decided to rely on Stevie — he happened to be sitting in front of me at the Saturday morning screening — for some expert commentary concerning "The Tigger Movie." Before the lights went down, he grilled his expert (i.e., his mother) on whether she thought Rabbit would be in it. She did.

Being a mother, she was right. In fact, the whole gang — Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Baby Roo, Owl, Eeyore, even Christopher Robin — is back in this charming animated feature, in which the irrepressible, ever-bouncing Tigger searches for his family. He learns, as you may have guessed, that families come in all shapes and sizes. And they don't necessarily have to come from the same family tree.

Fittingly, "The Tigger Movie" comes from a totally different branch of the Disney animated family. Unlike its more celebrated and ambitious cousins — "The Lion King," say, or "Tarzan" — "Tigger" is clearly aimed at little ones with limited attention spans. The Barney babies, you could call them. The songs, by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman ("Mary Poppins"), are sprightly, the dialogue is kid-level funny and the animation often has the manic energy of "Alice in Wonderland."

True, the action is laid on a bit thick. I don't think A.A. Milne ever envisioned an avalanche in his Hundred Acre Wood. But, given the adrenalin-hungry synapses of the post-"Star Wars" generation, that's probably not such a bad thing.

The voice talent is generally excellent. Special credit, however, must go to John Hurt as the narrator, who somehow manages to sound like a combination of Sterling Holloway (the original Pooh) and Sebastian Cabot (the original narrator). All in all, this is a movie that knows its intended audience and takes care of them.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

[an error occurred while processing this directive]