When A.A. Milne’s 1926 children’s novel “Winnie-the-Pooh” finally entered the public domain in 2022, filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield was waiting in the wings. For many decades, Winnie-the-Pooh was owned by Disney, and the corporate megalith had always been protective about its property. Pooh was a gentle and whimsical extension of the Disney brand. When Disney lost exclusive rights, Frake-Waterfield elected to shove his thumb in Disney’s eye and make “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” an incredibly cheap and horrendously bad slasher movie wherein everyone’s favorite silly-old-bear was reimagined as an eight-foot murdering lummox.
Although “Blood and Honey” is a terrible movie, curious audiences attended out of morbid curiosity, and the film ended up grossing $7.7 million on a paltry $100,000 budget. Its success inspired Frake-Waterfields to not only make “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2,” but also to announce a whole spate of other public domain childhood classics reinterpreted as cheap slasher movies. If all goes to plan, 2025 will see the release of “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare,” “Bambi: The Reckoning,” “Pinocchio: Unstrung,” and “Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble.” It’s only the second most evil Project planned for 2025.
As it so happens, “Blood and Honey” was never released in China, and it’s for the reason you may suspect, as all images of Winnie-the-Pooh are typically censored in China. It seems that a series of snarky internet memes have physically compared Disney’s version of Winnie-the-Pooh to China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping, who’s also round and ursine. It’s been rumored that the Chinese Communist Party frowns upon such a flippant disregard of their leader, and many images of Milne’s teddy bear are kept from public view as a result. “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” would certainly fall under that purview.
Winnie-the-Pooh is censored in China, presumably because Xi Jinping is compared to him.
The comparisons between Winnie-the-Pooh and Xi Jingping go back to 2013, when Xi met with then-President Obama. A photograph of the two leaders walking next to each other drew comparisons to a drawing of Pooh walking next to his tiger pal, Tigger. The comparisons began to stick. In 2017, when Xi met with then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, their subsequent awkward handshake drew snarky internet denizens to lay it next to a drawing of Pooh shaking hands with the depressive donkey Eeyore. The photographs in question can be found in an article in The Guardian. Of course, when comedians outside of China found this out, they decided to roll hard with the comparisons; the opening credits of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” featured Xi and Pooh next to each other.
The Internet is closely monitored in China, and mockery of Xi Jinping is typically censored by the government. Images of Winnie-the-Pooh are removed when they are placed next to Xi, which means Pooh-related media is often banned. The 2018 film “Christopher Robin,” a new Disney-related spin on “Winnie-the-Pooh,” wasn’t even released in China, while “South Park” was banned in the country when one of the show’s characters killed a Pooh bear that looked like Xi. The title of the episode was “Band in China.”
In 2023, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” was likewise pulled from release only two days before it was scheduled to open in China. The Chinese government never made any official statements as to why the film was banned, but it might be safely assumed that it was merely because Winnie-the-Pooh was still seen as an attack object against Xi Jinping. The BBC once posited that “Blood and Honey” fell under the purview of a censorship law that bans anything that is “potentially harmful to national security.” If Pooh is a roundabout symbol for Xi, and Pooh stalks and murders people in “Blood and Honey,” one can see how the censorship board would get nervous.
It’s all very silly.