Let’s Review a Movie: Springtime With Roo (2004)

Happy Easter to all who celebrate!

So for the occasion I’m looking at an Easter film; though I do find the title confusing.  The plot all revolves around the gang wanting Rabbit to celebrate Easter.  The only thing that has to do with spring is the fact that the holiday takes place during the season, and that Rabbit wants to turn it into Spring Cleaning Day instead.  Why this wasn’t called something like Roo and the Easter Bunny I don’t know.

The story works though and I like that all of Rabbit’s friends especially Roo really just want to help him.  They do agree to do Spring Cleaning Day even though they clearly don’t want to, to make him happy.  They have the best of intentions in decorating for Easter, thinking that Rabbit forgot about it.  Tigger even goes to talk to Rabbit about how much fun Easter is and that he should be the Easter Bunny again.  Rabbit has a sympathetic moment where we see he feels that Tigger took his place as the Easter Bunny and that hurt him.  Of course rather than tell anybody that he decide to scrap the holiday all together in favour of doing things his way.  Though naturally he gets his comeuppance via the narrator pulling a ghost of Christmas future by showing him an Easter where all his friends have moved away and he realizes he wasn’t being a good friend by being so controlling.  That’s a nice lesson about thinking of others and not being so insistent that you always get your way all the time.

The songs are forgettable, but the look of the film is very nice with a nice array of Easter colours like pink and purple and very pretty looking Easter eggs.  It also has all the usual Winnie the Pooh traits like misspelled words and interaction with the narrator. 

Overall though I have to say that this film just wasn’t very much fun for me, the songs as I said are just there, the Christmas Carol take off is something I’ve seen before, and Rabbit’s control freak attitude becomes very grating at times.  It’s not a bad film I am just clearly outside the age range it was intended for and there’s nothing here for older audiences.  It’s a fun film for kids with a good message, but not much else.