I think Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day is the best of the original Disney animated short films adapting the works of A. A. Milne. It has terrific songs and visual gags and an adventurous story with a windstorm and flooding. It's so wonderful, I even like the dream sequence with Heffalumps and Woozles in the middle, and I usually despise dream sequences.

It's a shame then to see it adapted so poorly into book form here, starting with the name change from "Blustery Day" to "Windy Day" and the excision of references to "Winds-day." I think this is all a result of multiple translations, because this book was probably first produced in Denmark as part of the "Anders Ands Bogklub" (a/k/a "Donald Duck Bookclub") which was imported to the U.S. as "Disney's Wonderful World of Reading." So the English storybook was adapted to an American movie that was translated to Danish and adapted into a Danish book that was then translated back to English for American publication. Milne's wordplay is literally lost in translation.

The pictures are fine, but the text is a bare-bones and lifeless condensation of the film and the chapters it adapts from Milne's original books. It probably doesn't help that the book is done anonymously, so the writers, translators, and artists may not feel obliged to do their best work.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... ) ( )

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Ugh, Disney Winnie-the-Pooh. It's basically a novelization of a Disney cartoon where all the madcap stuff that happens like everything getting knocked up in the air and landing in an implausible and funny way where nothing gets broken has to be described with humourless literalmindedness. ( )