Springtime with Roo

Springtime with Roo
File:Winnie the Pooh- Springtime with Roo.jpg
Directed by	Elliot M. Bour Saul Andrew Blinkoff
Written by	Tom Rogers
Based on	Characters created by A. A. Milne
Starring	Jim Cummings Jimmy Bennett John Fiedler Ken Sansom Kath Soucie Peter Cullen
Narrated by	David Ogden Stiers
Music by	Mark Watters
Production company	DisneyToon Studios
Distributed by	Walt Disney Home Video
Release dates	March 9, 2004 (2004-03-09)
Running time	65 minutes (USA)
Country	United States
Language	English

Springtime with Roo is a 2004 American direct-to-video animated film, featuring characters from Disney's Winnie-the-Pooh franchise. Unlike A Very Merry Pooh Year and Seasons of Giving, Springtime with Roo doesn't reuse episodes from The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

Plot

It is an adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol. An overexcited Roo, along with Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore, pay Rabbit a fine visit to celebrate Easter. But instead of finding an Easter party, they find a Spring-Cleaning Day celebration led by Rabbit who makes up the holiday to replace Easter. While Rabbit tends his garden by doing things his way, the gang cleans up his house, and Pooh sneezes and trashes the house. Then Roo finds all their Easter eggs and decorations stored away in Rabbit's closet, and throws a surprise Easter party for Rabbit. Unfortunately, he is enraged at them for not doing his "Spring Cleaning Day", and not doing exactly what Rabbit repeatingly told them to do, and literally throws them out of his house for disobeying him. Then the gang began to have a feeling that Rabbit does not want to celebrate Easter at all, which makes Roo very sad that Rabbit is really unhappy, and Tigger wants Roo to have a happy Easter. So Tigger tries to talk to Rabbit while Roo and the others try to make an Easter celebration of their own in their hopes of cheering up Rabbit.

In order to convince Rabbit that he still misses Easter and how he used to like it to which he does not believe from hating it so much, Tigger and the Narrator take Rabbit out of the storybook and back in time (specifically, a few chapters of the book, which is hundreds of pages away) to last year's Easter celebration, which was Roo's first Easter. Rabbit, as the Easter Bunny, tried to make everything as organized, orderly, and perfect as possible his way, treating Easter like a professional occasion rather than a great holiday. Tigger and the others wanted to have a fun and unique way of celebrating with making and hunting the eggs, but Rabbit was actually shown to be very over-protective on his views of the holiday, claiming, "It isn't fun; it's Easter!" while Tigger and the others swiped all of the Easter eggs behind Rabbit's back when he was saying that since he is the Easter Bunny, he makes the rules, and finds them hunting the eggs and celebrating Easter without him. Everyone is more happy with Tigger being the "Easter Bunny" instead of Rabbit. Feeling left out of the fun and very disappointed that he isn't the one getting this kind of honor from his friends, which was why he had decided to stop the Hundred Acre Wood from having another Easter celebration again and replace it with Spring Cleaning Day. Rabbit then finds out that Tigger was right about him liking Easter in his past, but rather than agreeing to allow the holiday back, Rabbit sadly tells Tigger he wants to be left alone, still upset about his past, and accusing Tigger of stealing his role as the Easter Bunny.

The present Tigger sadly returns to tell Roo and the others that Easter is still banned while Rabbit returns home in the book, until the narrator stops him, by putting the present pages on top of Rabbit. Although Tigger feels that he had let Roo down, the only thing Roo wants is for Rabbit to be happy again, so he and the others try to come up with a plan to do so. Meanwhile, the narrator purposely takes Rabbit to Roo's house instead of his own to show him how much Roo and the others still care about him, and how he should do the same thing, but Rabbit remains stubborn, angry, and unconvinced. He even puts away Piglet's pink Easter basket, Pooh's special honey pot, Eeyore's fluffy bunny ears, and Tigger's striped Easter egg in the chest saying, "If they just listen, if they follow orders, do as I say, but no no," until sitting on it and says humph. So late that night, the narrator (pretending to be a ghost) takes Rabbit into the "pages that have not yet been written", or into the future of the Hundred Acre Wood. It is Spring Cleaning Day, and all of the supplies and chores are organized exactly as Rabbit wanted, which makes him very happy. When he asks the narrator where everyone is, thinking that they're late as usual, the narrator tells him that they're not late but gone, because they moved away from the Hundred Acre Wood due to his selfishness and Christopher Robin, Owl and Gopher who are not present also moved away to prevent themselves to get involved. Rabbit at first doesn't believe him and tries to find them, believing that no one leaves the Hundred Acre Wood without telling him, but learns that the narrator was right when he sees that all of their houses are empty, looking like something out of a post apocalyptic horror movie.

While he was at Tigger's house, Rabbit finds Roo's drawing of him and Roo, and rushes to Kanga and Roo's house, which is also empty. So confused Rabbit says, "I don't understand, Roo was so looking forward to..," and the narrator asks, "Spring Cleaning Day, was it?" But Rabbit says "No, Easter. What have I done? Where are all my friends?". The narrator laughs at the word 'Friends' and says that Rabbit certainly didn't treat them like friends (in which Rabbit responses with an annoyed look), and shows him the way that he was acting, telling him that he never thought about what the others wanted and was only thinking of himself the whole time. Rabbit finally realizes that he was wrong to try to control something that everyone shares and loves and make it so it would be his way only, so he decides to change the future by changing his attitude to everyone else. However, he learns that the Easter supplies were taken with his friends when they moved, and he finds out that he is already too late. Until the very next morning, he wakes up on Easter day finding out he still has a chance to change the future when he sees the Easter supplies are back in the box and immediately begins to plan the grandest Easter the Hundred Acre Wood has ever had.

At the same time, Roo and the others (unaware that Rabbit has changed) come up with another idea in hopes of cheering Rabbit up, and while they are busy working, Rabbit, feeling as "giddy as a jackrabbit" (also pretending to be his mean usual self at first), brings out all of the Easter decorations (along with a new bunny tail for Eeyore) and starts happily preparing a big surprise for his friends, which everyone is very happy to see. Roo gives Rabbit a surprise as well, his Easter Bunny hat fixed, after being crushed by Rabbit earlier in the story. And the story ends with the annual Easter celebration proceeding as planned, and Roo popping out of the book for a bit saying, "BBFN, Bye-Bye For Now!"

Cast

• Jimmy Bennett as Roo
• Ken Sansom as Rabbit
• Jim Cummings as Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger
• John Fiedler as Piglet
• Peter Cullen as Eeyore
• Kath Soucie as Kanga
• David Ogden Stiers as The Narrator

Home media

The film was first released on both VHS and DVD on March 9, 2004. The VHS and DVD included the two episodes from The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Honey for a Bunny and Trap as Trap Can). The film was also re-released on Blu-ray on March 11, 2014 as a Hippity-Hoppity Roo edition.

Songs

• "We're Huntin' Eggs Today" - Tigger, Roo, Piglet, Pooh, Eeyore
• "Sniffly Sniff" - Pooh
• "Easter Day with You" - Tigger, Roo, Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore
• "The Way It Must Be Done" - Rabbit, Tigger, Roo, Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore
• "Easter Day with You (reprise)" - Roo
• "The Grandest Easter of Them All" - Rabbit
• "Easter Day with You (finale)" - Rabbit, Roo, Tigger, Piglet, Pooh, Eeyore

Christmas Carol

• The story's climax resolves in a direct homage to A Christmas Carol, with the Narrator speaking to Rabbit about his poor behavior and showing him a dark future in which Rabbit lives alone in the Hundred Acre Wood. The similarity is noted by Tigger in when he asks Rabbit, "What the Dickens-and I do mean 'Dickens'-is going on here?", during which he turns and winks at the audience (and breaks the fourth wall).
• Like A Christmas Carol, Tigger takes on the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Narrator takes the roles of the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Yet to Come/Future.
• This is the second time an A Christmas Carol adaption is about Easter and not Christmas. The first adaptation was Veggietales's episode An Easter Carol where Ebenezer Nezzar believes from his dead grandma's final words that as long as he makes Easter eggs every day she'll live forever even in the dead.
• Owl, Gopher, and Christopher Robin never appear at all.

External links

• Official website
• Springtime with Roo at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Springtime with Roo at IMDb