There is something fundamentally different about the latest film about children’s character Winnie The Pooh: his honey pot is filled with the blood of his victims this time. The horror film Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey is definitely not intended for minors. And Disney has nothing more to say about that. Until a few years ago, the horror picture that director Rhys Frake-Waterfield is now portraying of Pooh was impossible. A company like Disney has strict copyright laws. That means that not everyone can just make productions with the popular Disney characters. In Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey we see a Winnie-The-Pooh à la Leatherface in Chain Saw Massacre. The bloodthirsty and ferocious Winnie The Pooh and Piglet in the film are out for revenge on their friend Christoffer Robinson, who abandoned them. There are the necessary murders and scenes in which it is not clear whether Pooh’s mouth drips from the honey or from the body juices. How did it get this far? Winnie The Pooh was created in 1926 by Alan Alexander Milne and Ernest Shepard. Disney bought the bear’s exclusive licensing rights some forty years later. Winnie The Pooh has been copyrighted for decades. But these rights have expired since the beginning of this year. The copyright laws of the United States stipulate that a work may be held for “only” about a hundred years before it becomes part of the public domain again. The popular stuffed bear is now in public ownership.
