Showing posts with label winnie the pooh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winnie the pooh. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin's been eaten by bears!








I find it interesting, if not fascinating (now that I think about it, which I never have before because the poem seemed so soppy) that Christopher Robin is praying for the same reason anybody else prays.

Fear.

It's interesting too just what he is afraid of, as is made evident in the second poem. 

Bears.

Why would A. A. Milne choose bears?

It seems obvious when you look at it. In putting his own small son at the centre of stories which made him wildly world-famous, he was throwing him to the bears, if not the wolves. 

Never mind that his Winnie the Pooh was a "silly old bear", a "bear of very little brain". He was still a bear. The "Lines and Squares" poem refers to them as "masses of bears", one of the most disturbing images I've read in a long time.




It's well-known that Christopher Robin Milne was relentlessly bullied in school for his fringe-haired Edwardian alter ego. In all the photos of him clutching his famous bear, he looks unutterably sad, even frightened. It's also been said that his appearance was altered to make him look more like the innocent Ernest Shepard illustrations, instead of the other way around. Get out the scissors, trim up that fringe! Think how that must have played out as he grew up and left tender childhood behind.

Why do people use their children that way? The same reason anyone uses anyone, I guess. Selfishness, ego, human ruthlessness, narcissistic disregard for the wellbeing of one's nearest and dearest. And in the case of writers, a single-minded and overwhelming desire to be famous.

To me, the most chilling lines in that whole chilling poem are:

"Mine has a hood, and I lie in bed
And I pull the hood right over my head
And I shut my eyes, and I curl up small,
And nobody knows that I'm there at all.

This sounds like someone who is hiding. Hiding from what? Bears, the boogeyman, God? His own father? Or is it from the fictional Christopher Robin, a menace so inescapable that he can't get away from him even in the safety of his own bed?




Sunday, December 31, 2017

The more it snows (tiddely pom)




For my friend David in Abbotsford - hell, my BEST friend David in Abbotsford, let's not spare the horses! Abbotsford was clobbered yesterday with an ice storm and widespread power outages, and I'm waiting to hear from him (which, with a power outage, I might not for a while). New Years might be a tad of a trial, but I hope not. Piglet to Pooh, I hope you're someplace warm.





Saturday, May 21, 2016

Pooh gif. . . ts

   

While playing around with WTP/Ernest Shepard images, I decided to try to make a Pooh animation out of still pictures. Not such an easy thing to do when you have to find compatible images, then get size, colour, etc. to match. Well, it sort of worked, though it would have been nice to have more frames. Shepherd's watercolours had two styles: they could be quite detailed, but they could also be mere suggestions of animals, just shapes, and each of these pictures represents a type. 




And look at this!! I spent quite a while on this one, and had to fool around quite a bit with things like perspective. Ernest Shepard was really a lousy artist by technical standards. In one of these two pictures, Piglet was approximately twice the size shown here. I had to tinker around to get him to look OK in relation to Pooh. Perspective changes alarmingly, as do the size and shape of the animals which seem almost carelessly drawn. Was it a style of the times, I wonder? Whatever it was, it sucks to make gifs out of these. Even though they turned out pretty damn good.


Sunday, June 26, 2011

Whenever I walk in a London street













Whenever I walk in a London street,
I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;

















And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,















Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street

















Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, "Bears,




Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"


 
 
 
 
 

Christopher Robin Milne