Winnie The Pooh Is Loose And Heading Back To The Screen

Beloved kid-lit favorite Winnie the Pooh is getting a makeover courtesy of Baboon Animation, the studio of DreamWorks alum Mike de Seve (Madagascar, Monsters vs. Aliens) and IQI Media. The new project – envisioned as a feature length film followed by a potential animated series – re-imagines Pooh and the gang as kids ginning up trouble for young Christopher Robin.

The prequel is a collaboration between multi-Emmy-winning animation studio Baboon Animation (Angry Birds, Gigantosaurus), and IQI, a content incubator lab and subsidiary of Winvest Group (OTCMKT:WNLV). DreamWorks alum Charlene Kelly (Next Gen), now CIO at Winvest, and Khiow Hui Lim, the founder of IQI and CSO of Winvest, will executive produce. On the creative side, de Seve will direct and co-write with John Reynolds and Jeff Hylton.

“What started this furry snowball rolling is that I loved the books as a kid,” said de Seve. “It unleashed my imagination with the absurd and hilarious things the gang got up to.”

De Seve says the original books by A.A. Milne predated the kind of anarchic comedy found in more recent classics like Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, by pairing a provocative troublemaker and a gang of misfits with an innocent reluctantly drawn into their schemes. He and Hylton say they wanted to channel that mischievousness and spontaneity, which was not entirely captured in the typical portrayal of Winnie as a silly, middle-aged eccentric.

The Baboon team is addressing that by de-aging Winnie and putting him on a bit of a diet. “Everyone is going to be younger,” said de Seve. “No one has done young Pooh before. He’s going to look a little different from what we’re used to, maybe a little bit slimmer, but always scheming and mad about honey!”

De Seve says the prospective film and series will combine live action and animation, departing from the purely animated versions done over the last half century, starting with short features in the 1960s and continuing through various television series and specials down to the current day.

One factor driving the different approach is copyright law. The original Winnie the Pooh books, first published in 1921, fell into the public domain this year, although derivative works including the famous Disney animated versions, are still under copyright.

“Even though these stories come from an earlier time, they talk about friendship and community, which really speak to the values of Gen Z in the 21^st century,” said Khiow Hui Lim, whose firm is spearheading the financing and distribution effort.

This project is one of several examples of how even the incredibly complex and distorted IP regime in the United States can, eventually, work as intended. Copyright law was originally designed to ensure consumers with a steady stream of new creative innovations, giving creators a limited-duration monopoly period in which they could monetize their work before it lapsed into the public domain. As IP became a lucrative source of income for large corporations, businesses lobbied for longer and longer extensions on copyright.

These changes increased the ability of studios like Disney to extract rents from ownership of characters, but have kept the public from enjoying creative reinventions of stories (as Disney itself did with its many adaptations of fairy tales and fables), except for those whose creation predates living memory. Winnie the Pooh is one of several well-known characters who are finally available for today’s artists, animators and new media storytellers. Other works that may soon join Winnie and the gang include Buck Rogers (2023), Mickey Mouse and Popeye (2024), Conan the Barbarian (2027), King Kong (2028), and the works of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, H.P. Lovecraft and Dashiell Hammett.