The Chinese Communist Party reportedly pulled the low-budget British slasher horror film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey this week, just ahead of its debut, likely due to Chinese dissidents’ long-standing practice of using the cartoon bear to mock dictator Xi Jinping.
In the film, a serial killer dressed in a Winnie-the-Pooh mask, along with others in Pooh character masks, runs around bludgeoning people to death with sledgehammers and other implements. The film does not appear to contain any overt political messaging.
The slasher film had originally been scheduled to debut this month in 30 Chinese cinemas. Chinese censors initially canceled its debut for unspecified “technical reasons” but ultimately removed it from the release roster entirely. Beijing is also banning the film in Hong Kong and Macau, which are, in theory, “self-governing” areas.
Film distributor VII Pillars Entertainment announced in a Chinese-text post on Facebook that the release of the movie had been canceled with “great regret,” but the government never clarified with distributors exactly why it blocked their film.
China’s Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration claimed it had approved the film but, if it was pulled, it claimed cinemas acted due to “the commercial decisions of the cinemas concerned.” The office declined to make further comments on the issue.
Xi has often been depicted as Winnie the Pooh by dissidents in Internet memes around the world, prompting suspicion that a film featuring a blood-soaked Winnie-the-Pooh would inspire dissident speech and thus attract censorship.
The meme took off in 2013 when Xi Jinping visited the U.S. An unknown Internet user compared a photo of the portly Xi and a tall, thin President Barack Obama to an image of Pooh and his friend, Tigger. The image spiraled into use as a dissident symbol, resulting in Chinese censors banning online searches, mentions, and posts about the character created by English author A. A. Milne.
The memes became so persistent so quickly that in 2018, officials in Madrid, Spain, banned a street performer dressed as Pooh from being out in public when Xi was visiting for talks with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
The low-budget slasher film is not the first Pooh movie to be barred from Chinese cinemas. Chinese censors also blocked the showing of the 2018 Disney film starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Robin, a live-action and animated film following the life of the titular character based on the A. A. Milne characters. The Chinese government never explained the ban, but it was largely assumed to be because of the Xi/Pooh memes.
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