The beautiful trailer for Goodbye Christopher Robin trades on some very familiar images from the work of Winnie the Pooh writer AA Milne.
But it turns out they only tell half the story. Pooh’s “Hundred Acre Wood” may look idyllic, but if you go down to your local cinema today you’re sure of a big surprise.
This moving and eyeopening biopic reveals life was no picnic for the creators of the most famous bear.
Domhnall Gleeson plays Milne as a stuffy aristocrat who returns from the First World War suffering from what is now called PTSD.
Unable to write the breezy comedies for which he is famous, he decides to move his family from London to rural Sussex.
In their new tumbledown home, Milne – known to those close to him as Blue – will write a book about the futility of war, while his six-year-old son Christopher Robin (Will Tilston), who goes by the name Billy Moon (what is it with this family and names?), will play quietly with his beloved nanny Olive (Kelly Macdonald).
The plan doesn’t have much of a role for his selfish, socialite wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) who soon scurries back to London telling Blue she will only return when he has written something that will sell.
The eureka moment arrives when Olive takes a break from her duties, forcing Blue to pay attention to his son.
There’s a lovely sequence where they bond for the first time while walking through the soon-to-be-famous woodland that surrounds their home.
Blue suddenly stops dead in his tracks as the buzzing of bees sends him back to the fly-bitten trenches of France.
Billy can’t see the flashback but, unlike his mother, he knows instinctively how to calm his pacifist father.
Taking his hand, he reminds him that bees won’t sting as long as they aren’t provoked.
Milne realises the palliative he’s been seeking has been with him all along. He starts joining in his son’s flights of fancy, learning the name of his favourite teddy and helping to invent personalities for the rest of his menagerie of stuffed animals.
As we witness the birth of Pooh Bear, Tigger, Piglet and Eeyore, the romantic score surges and we are hit with a string of achingly beautiful shots of the Sussex countryside.
This chocolate box vision of a lost Eden is like witnessing the beer-fuelled daydreams of Nigel Farage and is familiar territory for those of us who have seen nostalgia-soaked literary biopics Miss Potter and Finding Neverland.
But director Simon Curtis is not quite ready for a happy ending. For him, what happens after Winnie becomes the world’s most famous bear is even more interesting.
After years of neglect, Billy is suddenly at the centre of attention.
Billed as “the real Christopher Robin”, he is forced to take part in radio interviews, appear at toy shops and, in one scene, even enters the bear enclosure at London Zoo for a publicity photo.
“He’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t make any sudden movements,” the zookeeper assures his famous father.
At first, the nanny was the only one to see the dangers of the child’s sudden fame, but now his father’s stiff-upper lip begins to quiver.
There is a clear message here about parental neglect, but a lovely understated turn from Gleeson and a refreshingly unaffected performance from the young Tilston manage to keep the preachiness at bay.
It’s an old-fashioned film but it stays with you. Pooh sticks!