Michael Morpurgo: I wouldn’t have messed with Winnie-the-Pooh

Do we really need an updated version of AA Milne’s classic where Pooh and Piglet get a new friend – a ‘pointless’ dog called Carmen? Could it be anything to do with film rights, wonders the ‘War Horse’ author Michael Morpurgo

The residents of Hundred Acre Wood – now with added Carmen the dog (Mark Burgess/Trustees of The Pooh Properties/Trustees of The Shepard Trust/PA))

Winnie-the-Pooh is a book I grew up with. The adventures of Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore have endured because they’re so beautifully crafted and wonderfully endearing. But I’m not convinced that what this set-up needs is a new character – a dog called Carmen – to make AA Milne’s stories any more perfect than they already are.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t retell old tales with new audiences in mind. In my time, I’ve written my own version of Beowulf, I’ve turned Raymond Briggs’s picturebook The Snowman into a children’s novella, and I’ve retold The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of Toto. Another pointless dog.

But if this Winnie-the-Pooh idea had been suggested to me – a rewrite, with a new character added into the mix, with the approval of the Milne estate – I’d have said no for two reasons: I do so love the original, and I’m not sure anyone can really pull it off.

For when you introduce an entirely new character into an established story, one that’s already made up of iconic characters, each with a strong sense of being, everything changes. How, for instance, will this dog be expected to get on with a timid little pig and a gloomy donkey?

There’s a reason why Milne didn’t give Christopher Robin yet another friend. And it’s probably the same reason Enid Blyton didn’t write about the Famous Six – it doesn’t quite have the same ring. With Pooh, Eeyore, Rabbit, Piglet, Owl, Tigger, Kanga and her little Roo to play with, perhaps nine would be the literary equivalent of too many cooks?

The inspiration for the new arrival in the Hundred Acre Wood came about after it was discovered that Milne had taken a toy dog with him when he served in the First World War. But I can’t help but wonder if, in introducing Carmen to the stories now, someone might have their eye on something more prosaic: film rights.

After big-screen adaptions of Paddington and Peter Rabbit, we’re probably due a live-action retelling of Winnie-the-Pooh. And if there’s a dog somewhere in the cartoon menagerie, the film poster would catch the eye of an even wider demographic of children.

As a rule, I think it’s good for writers to retell masterpieces. It’s rather like training to be an artist by copying a grand master: you get to improve your own techniques. But you have to have good reason to change a story drastically. When Armando Iannucci turned David Copperfield into a film, he updated it, giving it a modern spin. He didn’t invent new characters with cod-Dickensian names.

With my retelling of The Wizard of Oz, I did it because that’s a tale that everyone knows from the film; almost nobody has read the book. There’s something quite annoying about the dog, who has nothing to do except be carried around by Judy Garland, who keeps going around breaking into song. I thought he might have a bigger role to play in the original book, so I read it, and no: he’s just there. I find him quite irritating.

But then I wondered: what about if I took the story apart and wrote it from Toto’s point of view? He’s no longer just a dog who trots alongside Dorothy as her farmhouse gets blown away by the tornado, or getting under her feet as she skips along the Yellow Brick Road… Now he has a part to play, as the narrator.

Great stories should not be seen as holy writ. Shakespeare would agree – many of his greatest plays are retellings of other people’s works, after all. What got me into Shakespeare as a boy wasn’t the Bard himself, but Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, an easy-reader that, in my day, was in every primary school, but is not something that’s read much at all these days. Because Shakespeare can be difficult for young people, Lamb’s Tales offered my generation its first taste of Shakespearean stories in simplified English. And I’m so glad it did.

Soon, I will turn 80. When I’m gone, if anyone finds my original manuscript of War Horse in the hope of redoing my story with a character that I cut out at a draft stage, I’m happy to say they will be disappointed. They won’t find anything that didn’t find its way into my original story.

Michael Morpurgo’s latest book, ‘Tales From Shakespeare’ (Harper Collins Children’s Books), is out next Thursday. ‘Michael Morpurgo and Friends: An 80th Birthday Celebration’ is on Sunday 22 October at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, London. For details, go to fane.co.uk/michael-morpurgo