By Jim Fanning
“It’s POOH-fectly TIGGER-ific!” That’s the winsome way in which Disney proclaimed the release of its “all Nooh” featurette, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too in December 1974. Celebrating its 50th anniversary last month, this whimsical whirl through the world of Pooh is the third entrancing entry in Disney’s series of animated adventures of the beloved “silly old bear” and his lovable friends—including a certain striped superstar. So get your bounce on as we go on an “explore” of this bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy (fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!) animated featurette.
Tigger Bounces Back
The follow-up to the silly old bear’s first big screen entry, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968) was an even bigger hit than its Pooh predecessor, winning an Academy Award® as Best Cartoon Short Subject. The breakout—make that bounce-out—star was Tigger, who burst onto the screen for the first time, instantly joining the colorful canon of favorite Disney characters. Another animated offering from the Hundred Acre Wood was a must, with Tigger as its lead character.
In Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, everything centers on boisterous Tigger, whose bouncing is becoming increasingly bothersome, as the hyperactive tiger knocks his friends flat on their backs and otherwise wreaks havoc throughout the Hundred Acre Wood. Rabbit holds a “protest meeting” and determines Tigger must be “unbounced,” with merrily mixed results.
Always Faithful to A.A. Milne
Producer and Disney Legend Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman noted that “maintaining that timeless charm” created by Winnie-the-Pooh author A. A. Milne and illustrator Ernest H. Shepard was his primary objective. “It was a real challenge to put Pooh on film and retain his intrinsic innocence and sweetness without making him dull or boring,” he said.
A member of Walt’s elite animation team known as the Nine Old Men and director of the first two Pooh featurettes, Reitherman revealed that the secret in conveying the gentle flavor of the original books was to stick to the playfully quaint dialogue written by Milne and to pattern the character and environmental designs after Shepard’s charming illustrations. “Most cartoons nowadays rely on slapstick and a lot of action,” Reitherman said. “But in Pooh there isn’t any of that. The beauty is in the tenderness and warmth of the characters.”
The directive to maintain Milne’s whimsy was a decree that came directly from Walt Disney. “Originally, Walt sent down the Pooh stories to me,” recalled Disney Legend Bill Justice, who was among the first artists responsible for bringing the character to Disney Animation. “He told us to stick to what Milne had written. He said there’s a certain charm in the writing and characters and we shouldn’t change too much.”
In keeping with that tradition, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too is in essence an adaptation of three of Milne’s chapters: “In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle” from Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), and “In Which Tigger Is Unbounced” and “In Which It Is Shown That Tiggers Don’t Climb Trees” from The House at Pooh Corner (1928).
Pooh’s Old Pros
For this new addition to Pooh’s animated annals, Reitherman (seen above, left, with Sebastian Cabot and story artist Larry Clemmons) handed the directorial reins to his fellow member of the Nine Old Men John Lounsbery, marking this Disney Legend and veteran supervising animator’s directorial debut. In addition to Reitherman and Lounsbery, four other Nine Old Men (and Disney Legends) were among Tigger Too’s creative forces as directing animators: Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Milne aficionados both; Eric Larson, who was spearheading the training of the new animators; and Milt Kahl, who had masterfully designed and animated Tigger for Blustery Day. Interestingly, Kahl was the directing animator for another famous—and very different—Disney tiger aside from Tigger: Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967).
Pooh’s New Pros
Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too also featured animation by the new generation of animators who were being trained by the old guard. Under the supervision of Frank Thomas, John Pomeroy animated a scene of Tigger. A particularly challenging assignment as the character emoted feelings not seen in his previous appearance, the scene was animated by Pomeroy nearly 20 times before he got it just right. “I got very frustrated but never angry because I knew I was working for a genius,” Pomeroy told animation historian John Canemaker. “There would always be something wrong. As Tigger trudges away in the snow he was going up too high or going down too low in the squash [position], or the tail is too active, or the stripes [aren’t] working right, or the overlap on the ears. Everything had to be perfectly choreographed, especially on a pathos scene. ’Cause you never want to be aware that it’s drawn. You want this illusion complete and if there’s any little thing wrong you spoil it.”
Then-new animator Andy Gaskill also worked on the featurette. “I have a total of 40 feet that’s all mine in the film, but that doesn’t last very long on the screen—and it took me six months to do! It’s an incredible art.” Working uncredited on Tigger Too was Ron Clements, the future director (with John Musker) of such hits as The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), and The Princess and the Frog (2009).
A Colorful Vocal Cast for Cuddly Characters
As always with Disney Animation, the voices of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too were key. “Sincerity is an all-important factor,” observed Reitherman of the challenge of casting voices in Disney Animation, especially the Pooh films. “Even though our characters are caricatured, they have to have warmth and actors with trick, gimmicky deliveries come off [as] too hokey for our particular needs.”
The repertory company of Pooh actors performed a vocal encore for this third film. In what is his most beloved role, Disney Legend Sterling Holloway once again voiced the bear of little brain. In the midst of his six-season run as timid Mr. Peterson on the hit TV series The Bob Newhart Show, John Fiedler again performed the sweetly stammering speech of Piglet. Celebrated for his crotchety characterization as Archimedes the owl in The Sword in the Stone (1963), character actor Junius Matthews was in his mid-70s when originally cast as Rabbit. When production began on Tigger Too a decade later, the Disney animators assumed Matthews would no longer be available given his advanced age, but when they were unable to find a suitable replacement, they finally sought out the aged actor, only to discover he was not only available, but was as full of vibrant personality as ever as the neighborly but easily irritated Rabbit.
The Voice of the Ventriloquist: Paul Winchell
Also returning for another star turn: Paul Winchell, whose brilliant vocals as Tigger helped in no small part to make the one-of-a-kind critter an immediate favorite in Blustery Day. An acclaimed ventriloquist, Winchell was also an inventor with more than 40 patents, including for an artificial heart. In addition, he was a character actor in such classic TV series as The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
As for his most famous role, “Tigger was an extremely rambunctious kind of a guy with an awful lot of enthusiasm in his voice,” observed Winchell, “and silly at the same time and full of laughter. I even wrote one line just by ad-libbing, every time when he left [Pooh], he would say, ‘Well, TTFN, ta-ta for now!’”
“I’m the Narrator”: Sebastian Cabot
In Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, Sebastian Cabot once again serves as the gentle, genteel narrator. Best known as Mr. French, the proper gentleman’s gentleman in the Family Affair TV series— where he sometimes was known to read Milne’s Pooh stories—Cabot was the gruff voice of Sir Ector in The Sword in the Stone and Bagheera the stern panther in The Jungle Book. The British character actor even appeared on camera in Walt Disney’s Johnny Tremain (1957) sans his trademark beard, shaved off at the insistence of Walt himself.
The Tigger Too filmmakers continued the clever concept of incorporating the pages of the Milne books into the animation. They brought this conceit to new heights when—spoiler alert!—the narrator “narrates” Tigger from his precarious perch atop a treetop, which is too high for Tigger. In the sequence, the narrator cleverly tilts the book, allowing the scaredy cat to slide down the text to terra firma.
“In our animation, we show pages turning, characters springing into action from still poses and Tigger using the printed lines like a ladder,” Reitherman noted. The producer relied on Cabot’s genial off-screen performance to tie it all together, claiming the use of the English actor’s dulcet tones made watching the featurette more like listening to a bedtime story: “The narration helps the book come to life.”
Roo Bounces Into the Spotlight
Although introduced along with the main cast of cuddly Hundred Acre Wood citizens in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Kanga’s little son, Roo, had his first chance to shine in this new Pooh featurette. Since the Milne originals established Roo as Tigger’s playmate, this production offered the perfect story to integrate the egotistical tiger’s fellow bouncer into his new adventures.
In his initial 1966 appearance, Roo was voiced by Clint Howard (today a character actor who frequently appears in the films of his director brother, Ron Howard), but in Tigger Too, the voice of Roo is Dori Whitaker (seen above with Larry Clemmons). The sister of Johnny Whitaker, another Family Affair cast member and the star of Disney’s Napoleon and Samantha (1972), Dori gives a delightfully scene-stealing performance.
Bouncy Bonus: Roo’s extended role also meant a bigger part for Kanga, voiced by Barbara Luddy. The voice of Lady in Lady and the Tramp (1955) and the good fairy Merryweather in Sleeping Beauty (1959), the legendary vocal artist also gave voice to Mother Rabbit in Robin Hood (1973). Mother Rabbit was the mother of Tagalong—who, coincidentally, was voiced by Dori Whitaker.
Winnie the Pooh and Memorabilia Too
Released on December 20, 1974, on the same bill as Disney’s live-action epic The Island at the Top of the World, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too brought with it a slew of tasty tie-ins. Aside from reissued story and activity books connected to other Pooh projects, there was a Tigger Too sticker fun book, a coloring book, a Tell-A-Tale Book titled Winnie the Pooh and the Unbouncing of Tigger, and a classic View-Master® set of stereoscopic reels. A comic-strip adaptation of this instant Disney classic was serialized in the Walt Disney’s Treasury of Classic Tales Sunday page, published in 40 newspapers with an estimated 50 million readers.
Honors for Pooh and Tigger Too
Most winning of all was the Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too LP record album, specially produced to celebrate Pooh’s return to the screen. The album won a Grammy® Award as Best Recording for Children. The film itself garnered a honey of an Oscar® nomination as Best Animated Short Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Reitherman knew why audiences of all ages were delighted by Disney’s Pooh: “People love Disney’s version of Pooh. He’s as real as the Pooh they’ve been reading about all their lives. Milne’s type of writing is so unusual that it appeals to the young and old alike, which makes the Pooh adventures classic pieces of prose.” Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too was incorporated into the feature compilation, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), and its endearing legacy endures today, with new misadventures here, there, and everywhere—all starring the silly old bear and that bouncy forever-in-motion feline known as Tigger.
