The Absolutely Different Winnie-the-Pooh

A still from Winnie-the-Pooh (1969)Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the lineup:1. How Winnie-the-Pooh was reimagined in the Soviet Union.2. Animation newsbits.Now, let’s go!1. Reinventing PoohDuring the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the USSR, there emerged a series of films based on Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s a treasure. Each entry handles Milne’s stories precisely, and with incredible charm and humor. They all remain hugely popular today.And at the films’ core is their take on Pooh himself. He isn’t quite Milne’s Pooh, or Disney’s. Many hands at Moscow’s Soyuzmultfilm made him what he is.A precious book from recent years is Legends of the Soyuzmultfilm Studio. Historian Sergey Kapkov wrote it — gathering some 400 pages of interviews with people from the studio’s classic era. Winnie-the-Pooh veterans were among them. Director Fyodor Khitruk, animator Violetta Kolesnikova and designers Eduard Nazarov and Vladimir Zuikov all spoke to him about…