Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
Spring has indeed sprung: While the Northeast is digging itself out from the latest dump of last-gasp snow, much of the rest of the hemisphere is staring wistfully out the rain-streaked window and wondering if it’s too late to build an ark.
Perfectly expressing both the precipitation fatigue and the wistful regression into childhood that it produces (not that we professional Internet reporters know anyone who stays in sweats and slippers all day, oh perish the thought) this GIF comes from Disney’s 1968 animated short “Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day,” which itself comes from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. The animation represents the beginning of Chapter Nine of that classic work of literature.
It’s a beautiful, evocative moment expressing the moment for the reader when the book itself vanishes as a physical object and text delivery device and transforms into a gateway to a new world. It is an exquisite example of animation as art, an early example of kinetic text, produced by Disney’s armies of officially-faceless artists, under the direction of Wolfgang Reitherman.
On the OhYesGifsPlease Tumblr since 2011, this GIF has swept up 4,005 notes. But when it was reposted March 9 on Ubduuh, it suddenly struck the zeitgeist, collecting 740,561 notes in just two days.
