Learning Through Disney

What your child can learn from Disney Videos


Movie Title & Age Suitability
The Many Adventures of Winnie the PoohRated G for General ExhibitionRecommended viewing for children aged 2 - 8 years.


Character Traits

• Winnie the Pooh is kind, cheerful and funny.	• Tigger is energetic, confident and athletic.
• Eeyore is intelligent, quiet, sometimes glum.	• Piglet is trusting, loyal, honest, slightly timid and softly spoken.
• Owl is wise and eloquent. • Rabbit is quick witted and decisive. • Christopher Robin is confident, caring and responsible.

Movie's key message
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is a great way of illustrating how fun, adventure and looking out for each other is what friendship is all about.


Why it's good for your child
Pooh makes up songs and ditties about the situations he finds himself in and delights in rhyming words. For example, Pooh says to Christopher Robin, "aim me at the bees please" when he is hanging from a balloon looking for honey.Like Pooh, children can also learn to be creative by making up their own words.Winnie the Pooh shows kids to form friendship groups and teaches the values of kindness, loyalty and the most important friendship bond - having fun together!


How parents can use Winnie the Pooh to aid development
Encourage your child to think up words that rhyme with one another - just like Pooh!Rhymes are the building blocks to poetry and kids can have a great time thinking up simple rhyming words such as 'dog', 'log', 'fog' etc.


Fun Facts - The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

• Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, and friends were based on the books written by A.A Milne and illustrated by Ernest H Shepard.
  
• AA Milne based the collection of stories on his son Christopher Robin and his collection of toys - Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl and Piglet amongst others.
  
• In 1966 the world first got to see the new animated Pooh and friends in Walt Disney's film, "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree".
  
• Walt Disney wanted to retain the original personalities and characteristics of Pooh and his friends as much as possible in the animated films. Disney's animators changed the original illustrations in order to allow the characters to move, be viewed from all angles and display a greater range of expressions.
  
• Winnie the Pooh books were favourites of Walt Disney's daughters

Fun Facts - Mary Poppins

• Mary Poppins, directed by Robert Stevenson, was released in theatres in 1964 and runs for 139 minutes.
  
• Mary Poppins received 13 Academy Award nominations and won five Oscars for Best Actress, Best Song, Best Music Score, Best Film Editing and Best Visual Effects.
  
• The combination of live action and animated actors was achieved through Color Travelling Matte Composite Cinematography, a technique which was specially created for the film and which earned a special scientific Academy Award.
  
• At the time of production, the special effects employed were the most challenging ever undertaken by the studio. In order to create the magic scenes, materials ranging from bungee cords to piano wire were employed.
  
• With its fabulous box office run, Mary Poppins became the most
  successful feature Disney had ever produced at the time of its release.
  
• Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, made famous by Mary Poppins, is not the longest word in the English language. The longest is a medical word - pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokonios.

Fun Facts - Peter Pan

• Peter Pan is the original creation of Scottish born James Matthew Barrie who originally wrote Peter Pan as a play in 1904.
  
• Peter Pan was J M Barrie's greatest success and in 1912 he turned it into a book called "Peter and Wendy".
  
• Walt Disney's Peter Pan was released in theatres in 1953 and runs for 77 minutes.
  
• It took almost 20 years between the time Walt Disney started making plans for creating Peter Pan in the early 1930s to the time that production actually began in 1949.
  
• The greatest challenge for animators responsible for Peter Pan was trying to create a feeling of weightlessness in the two-dimensional characters.
  
• It was once rumoured that the character of Tinkerbell was based on Marilyn Monroe, however the real life model was 22 year-old Margaret Kerry.

Fun Facts - Pinocchio

• Pinocchio has been released at theatres on eight different occasions -1940, 1945, 1954, 1962, 1971, 1978, 1984 and 1992.
  
• The original film required the talents of 750 people including animators, assistants, layout artists, background painters and special effects animators.
  
• During its creation, more than two million drawings were produced and approximately 1,500 shades of paint were used.
  
• After five months work on Pinocchio, including animation, Walt Disney decided to scrap what had already been produced and start again in order to get it right.
  
• The movie is based on the serialised stories of Italian journalist Carlo Lorenzini (aka Collodi) written in 1881 for a children's illustrated weekly in Florence.
  
• In the original book, Jiminy Cricket had no name and was squashed by Pinocchio! Despite this, Jiminy Cricket became the film's most popular character and appeared in subsequent Disney films and television shows.
  
• Pinocchio cost $2.6 million in 1940, however if using the same techniques and processes, it would cost an estimated $100 million today!
  
• A live action version of the much-loved Pinocchio tale, starring Roberto Benigni, will be released late 2003.