The sweet, oft-befuddled bear actually evolved out of Milne’s decidedly unquiet time on the Western Front during World War I. Nobody really reads Mary Poppins or Pinocchio because the films are so accomplished they’ve supplanted the source,” says Frank Cottrell-Boyce, co-screenwriter of Goodbye Christopher Robin, the new movie about the story-behind-the-Milne-stories. “If you write a very good book, and someone makes a very good film about it, the book just disappears. Consider poor Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” which most kids only know via the $400-million box office adaptation, Frozen, or, for that matter, Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” What’s amazing about Pooh’s modern cartoon-y familiarity is that as big as the Magic Kingdom is, the original not only survives, but thrives as a continued source of fascination. The characters from 1928’s smash bestseller The House on Pooh Corner live side-by-side with the cartoon iterations in a way very few originals and their Disney-fied versions do. Milne stories, which continue to co-exist alongside the better-known Disney juggernaut. The NYPL’s Winnie-the-Pooh was the real-life inspiration for the original A.A.

The original Pooh is amazingly still alive, well into the 21st-century, in both literary and animated forms. But he’s still Pooh, a bit matted down, a bit overly loved, but in great shape considering he’ll soon be 100 years old. The bear is not the red-shirted “tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” found in cribs around the world, more a regular ole’ fuzzy variety, a simple knock-around bear.

Together, in one cage, are a young pig, a donkey, a tiger, a kangaroo, and a bear known the world over as Winnie-the-Pooh. In the main branch of the New York Public Library, there lives a group of wild animals that call the children’s section home.

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