Peter Rabbit’s down a hole with his American pals . . .
THIS film caused a real hoo-ha with a scene in which a man allergic to blackberries is pelted with them, causing him to collapse and Sony Pictures to apologise.
From where I was sitting, the perceived insensitivity towards allergy-sufferers — and I write as a man annually felled by hay fever — wasn’t the tiniest bit offensive.
There are also a number of comedy electrocutions in this film, so should we rage, too, at the insensitivity towards all those who have suffered at the mercy of an electric current?
It’s all depicted with cartoonish jollity, in the name of innocent fun. Sony might have said as much, instead of falling on their sharpened carrots by way of instant contrition.
But that’s not to say that Beatrix Potter doesn’t deserve a huge posthumous apology.
American director and co-writer Will Gluck has taken some ghastly liberties with her charming stories, and made some regrettable misjudgments.
One is the choice of James Corden to voice Peter. He sounds too old, too knowing, too glib. Another is
the failure to anglicise certain Americanisms. When was an ‘ice cream truck’ ever spotted in Potter’s beloved Lake District?
Yet, for all that, the film’s sheer exuberance gradually won me over, with the help of some genuinely fantastic computer-generated imagery very cleverly integrating the animals with the live-action cast.
Also, there are some proper laughs along the way. I loved the dim cockerel, who is amazed every morning to see the run rising again.
There were plenty of chortling children at the screening I went to, so I can recommend this as a reliable family outing, even if it never manages to emulate the delightful Paddington and Shaun The Sheep films, as it is trying, all too conspicuously, to do.
As for the story, Potter fans look away now. When Mr McGregor (Sam Neill) dies while chasing Peter out of his garden, the house is left to his only surviving relative, a great-nephew who works at Harrods (another sop to the U.S. audience).
This is Thomas McGregor (Domhnall Gleeson), who arrives in the Lake District to claim his legacy and has to pretend to adore animals because he is smitten by his fragrant new neighbour, rabbit-loving Bea (Rose Byrne), who has clearly been written in as a kind of proxy Beatrix P.
From there, the story becomes a lively comedy of concealment: Thomas trying to keep his loathing of fluffy animals away from Bea; Peter and his relatives (Margot Robbie voices Flopsy, with Elizabeth Debicki as Mopsy and Daisy Ridley as Cotton-Tail) trying to let her know, but then realising that they might have gone too far in making Thomas look a fool.
With the animals doing their thing and the humans doing theirs, it sometimes veers closer to the wizards and Muggles of Harry Potter, and even the weird imaginings of Dennis Potter.
But, as I say, I heard the under-tens laughing merrily, and maybe that should be the only test of a good children’s film; not how far it diverges from the much-loved original book.