The release of the horror film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” has been canceled in Macau and Hong Kong, the distributor announced on Tuesday, raising questions about the censorship experienced in the two Chinese regions.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has been compared to the famous bear Winnie the Pooh – a character created by Britain’s Alan Alexander Milne – since a 2013 meeting with then-US President Barack Obama.
Far from the Disney (USA) and Soyuzmultfilm (Russia) studios, which popularized the character, the version of “Blood and Honey” is a bloody adaptation of the British Rhys Frake-Waterfield, released in the United States in February.
In a post on the social network Facebook, the distributor VII Pillars Entertainment expressed “deep regret” on Tuesday, without specifying what motivated the decision.
The Hong Kong government said it had issued an authorization for the film to be released, suggesting that it had not been censored.
But the organizer of the preview, which was scheduled to take place on Monday, canceled the event citing technical reasons.
Winnie the Pooh has become a symbol of opposition to the Chinese president in recent years. Chinese censorship has banned references between the Chinese leader and the bear on the internet, and in 2018 it was reported that the release of the film “Christopher Robin”, which also featured Winnie the Pooh, was rejected in China.
Kenny Ng, a film professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, declined to speculate on the reason for the cancellation, suggesting that the mechanism for silencing critical voices appears to be resorting to business decisions.
Hong Kong and Macao are Chinese special administrative regions, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 and 1999, respectively, promising to maintain the freedoms and way of life prevailing until then.
Ng said Hong Kong has seen more censorship cases in the past two years, mainly targeting non-commercial films like independent shorts.
“When there is a red line, there are more taboos,” he said.
Source: TSF
