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To its credit, Piglet's Big Movie, unlike most of Disney's franchise pictures, isn't offensive (unless ennui really burns your britches), but it was hamstrung (har-har) from the outset by the departure through death or firing of original Pooh voice actors Sterling Holloway (Pooh), Paul Winchell (Tigger), Ralph Wright (Eeyore), Junius Matthews (Rabbit), and Hal Smith (Owl)--only the inveterate John Fielder returns to lend his vocal cords to Piglet, and while Jim Cummings sounds exactly like Holloway and Winchell in replacing them, he lacks the mischievous twinkle that both brought to their respective roles. Meanwhile, the character-sprung songs, a major ingredient of the series' charm, are appalling in Piglet's Big Movie and dominated by Carly Simon, who appears in an inexplicably live-action closing credits sequence singing solo in the Hundred-Acre Wood. (There are no tunes to get kids in touch with their melancholy side early like Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's depressing "The Rain Rain Rain Came Down, Down, Down," only stuff to teach them how lousy music is until you replace your Fisher-Price radio with a ghetto blaster.) And did we need another Disney flick with an anthology structure on the heels of Cinderella II, Atlantis: Milo's Return, and Tarzan & Jane?

Piglet goes missing, Pooh and co. eventually notice, and they use the pictorial journal that Piglet keeps not only as a tracking device (an idea overly precious--why would Piglet return to the scenes of past adventures?--even for A.A. Milne's stuffed-animal townies, who are at peak witlessness here), but also as an instigator of flashbacks to the time the ever-invasive Kanga gave Piglet a bath, the time Piglet built a house for Eeyore, and the time Piglet discovered the "north pole" (the best chapter in the lot and perhaps not coincidentally the only one with a punny Milne quality). The point is to show the others that the oft-underestimated Piglet has achieved big things despite his small stature; trouble is, we know that moral from the start, when Piglet saves his ungrateful comrades from a swarm of bees--kids can tell when they're being put through the paces, and I imagine that many a youngin' would find this film more tedious than edifying in spite of its good intentions and an eye-popping palette typical of Disney Pooh.

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