The new Disney movie about Christopher Robin tells a sweet story about the son of author A.A. Milne and his stuffed bear, but the real tale isn’t quite as warm and fuzzy. In the new movie, Ewan McGregor plays an adult Christopher Robin who has lost his childish imagination and Winnie the Pooh helps him get it back.
The Daily Mail shares that the real Christopher Robin would have needed more than Pooh Bear to get his childhood back, as he was severely embittered as a result of his father’s story. The real Christopher felt that his father had exploited his childhood and caused him to be teased, bullied, and gawked at throughout.
The movie, Christopher Robin has McGregor as a workaholic with a wife and a daughter who has forgotten how to enjoy himself and needs his old friends to remind him about the good times he enjoyed as a child through adventures with Winnie the Pooh.
The real story has Christopher Robin hating his father and wanting to get as far as possible from Pooh, Piglet, and Eyore as possible. Christopher sought comfort with his first cousin which reportedly resulted in a handicapped child as a result of incest.
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A.A. Milne didn’t want to be a children’s author, but his stories of Winnie the Pooh were his big success. But because the English author desperately wanted to be taken seriously, he never enjoyed the success that came from the stories about Christopher Robin and Pooh. His fans wanted more and more children’s stories, and he felt that this was a burden.
Milne had Christopher (he dropped the “Robin” when he went to school) record many of his stories and poems when he was young, and the author insisted that his son loved them.
“He loves it, is quite unshy, and speaks beautifully.”
When Christopher went to boarding school, the other boys played the tape over and over again. Christopher was furious.
“Eventually the joke, if not the record, wore out and they handed it to me. I took it and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field.”
Christopher blamed his father and was bitter that his father’s success was due to his own story, while after a time in the army, he was struggling.
“It seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”
Things worsened between Christopher and his parents when he married his first cousin, bringing the shame of incest to the family. Christopher and his wife moved far away from his family and opened a bookshop. Christopher Robin Milne died in 1996 at the age of 75.