Working the format

For the last few days, we’ve been hit by sudden deluges of rain. Glancing at it out the window one evening, a childhood memory was triggered.

It’s a scene from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, where it rains so hard the words wash off the page. Here’s the full sequence:

“It was raining all over the Hundred Acre Wood. There was a thunderstorm on page 71… And on page 73, there was a bit of a cloudburst.”

This trick of playing with the literal text of the book was one of my favourite parts of the Winnie the Pooh films when I was a kid– the acknowledgement that they were inside a book was just so fun. At other points in the story, the narrator reveals Owl “talked from page 41 to page 62” or, in a later cartoon, turns the book sideways to help Tigger out of a tree.

I wanted to learn more about this form of storytelling and came across a media studies website that classifies it as part of “diegetic shifts of Winnie the Pooh”:

“The structure of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery day remediates print books through narration that shifts fluidly between omniscient voice-over and conversation with on-screen characters. Innovative text treatment also renders words on the page as both part of the framing device and a component of the diegetic story-world.”

According to a small making-of documentary, this aspect of having the characters interact with the book they are in was the vision of director Wolfgang Reitherman, although I notice it’s also lifted in some ways from the original stories by A.A. Milne. Take this exchange from “Chapter One: In Which We Are Introduced.”

“Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders.

(‘What does ‘under the name’ mean?’ asked Christopher Robin.

‘It means he had the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it.’

‘Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t quite sure,’ said Christopher Robin.

‘Now I am,’ said a growly voice.

‘Then I will go on,’ said I.)

It’s also the central conceit of one of my other childhood favourites, Chuck Thompson’s “Duck Amuck”, in which Daffy Duck is made fully aware he’s on a piece of paper:

Both of these stories are well-regarded: The Blustery Day won an Academy Award, and Duck Amuck has been inducted into the Library of Congress. What strikes me about them is there’s no other format they could work in: the storytellers are not just telling a story, they’re telling the story in a way that can only be told in this format.

It reminds me of Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes opining somewhere (I think the Tenth Anniversary Book, but I’m not sure) that the best comics are funny visuals AND funny text– if you’re not using both, you’re not utilizing the medium to its full extent. There’s also a Quentin Tarantino line in the recesses of my memory about loving action sequences because they’re the sort of thing you can only do in movies. It’s all about working the format you’re in to its full extent.

“If you’re not thinking about sound design, why isn’t the story just a print piece?”

– Mira Burt-Wintonick

As an addendum, the design of the characters in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons are gorgeous: note how you can see the underlying pencil sketches under the watercolour.

Further reading on the animation style in the Winnie the Pooh films:

Classic No. 22 The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)

Winnie-the-Pooh’s 90-Year Journey from Pencil Sketch to Disney Icon

Animation Magazine: Back to the Days of Christopher Robin

The Tangible Narration of Winnie the Pooh