When the first trailer for the new, updated Peter Rabbit came out a few months ago, the general reaction was horror. Here was Beatrix Potter’s delightful 19th century creation as an obnoxious, James Corden-voiced lout who abuses songbirds, scatters lettuce leaves like dollar bills and holds a raucous frat party in Mr McGregor’s house involving – get ready to primp your petticoats – twerking! Ms Potter would be turning in her vegetable patch. But as with Paddington – remember the “creepy Paddington” meme? – expectations of sacrilege were overdoing it somewhat. This kids’ animation is altogether lively and funny with just enough soul, even if it comes at the expense of Potter’s sensitivity and delicacy.
Directed by Will Gluck – whose record includes the saccharine Annie remake but also top teen comedy Easy A – this does indeed do a Paddington on Potter. It deploys a similar live-action/animation hybrid, executed so seamlessly it rarely stands out. These rabbits still scamper along, “lippity-lippity” as Potter put it, but they also walk on their hind legs, wear jackets, and pull off a full complement of human emotions on their cute little faces.
And, like Paddington, it cleanly moves the story into the present day. Things pick up not far from where Potter left off. Here’s cheeky Peter still stealing from Mr McGregor’s vegetable patch, aided by cousin Benjamin and sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail (voiced by Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki and Daisy Ridley). Some things have moved on: Mrs Rabbit has died, and rake-flailing old McGregor has a kindly neighbour called Bea (Rose Byrne), who’s sympathetic to the rabbits’ natural instinct to feed themselves. Mr McGregor is not long for this earth either, it turns out, which brings his uptight, city-dwelling nephew Domhnall Gleeson to fill the Lake District homestead. “I’ve got nothing against the countryside; I just find it disgusting,” he says. Given that this is green, pleasant movie English countryside, with not a battery chicken farm in sight (or a Cumbrian accent in earshot), there’s not a lot to complain about – except for the local wildlife.
It almost goes without saying that Gleeson hates rabbits as well, but to make things interesting, he and Bea start to get along rather well. Peter and friends look on in horror as the humans bond, even as Gleeson upgrades the vegetable-patch security. Thus, an inter-species war of attrition ensues for the affections of Bea, who’s given little to do beyond be oblivious and fragrant. Gleeson, on the other hand, has a harder circle to square, as both antagonist and romantic lead, and to his credit, he stays on the tightrope, even switching between both in one scene as he and Peter feign friendship for each other to appease Bea, only to be resume their fight every time she leaves the room.
In fact, it’s often Gleeson’s new Mr McGregor we feel sorry for. Corden’s Peter is cut from a more contemporary cloth but he’s essentially the same reckless, cocky charmer, who ultimately takes things too far. Peter’s acts become ever more aggressive, even sadistic. It’s unlikely Potter imagined her cherished bunny exploiting Mr McGregor’s blackberry allergy, or booby-trapping his house so that he’s repeatedly electrocuted and thrown across the room – but hey, this is the 21st century, grandma!
On the plus side, a great deal of the comedy works, which does much to gloss over its unevenness. There’s a menagerie of supporting fauna, each with their own recurring gag: from a cockerel who’s astonished every morning to find that the sun has come up, to a somewhat camp Pigling Bland whose greed always gets the better of his cultivated manners. There are some inventive, Paddington-style slapstick, and a good many throwaway quips that keep things buoyant, and it’s a relief to report that the trailer’s twerking and lettuce dollar-bill-spraying don’t make it into the movie.
These are issues inherent in updating any established children’s story. When it goes right – as with Paddington – it is keeping the story alive for a new generation (and with Paddington’s box office, expect plenty more like this). When it goes wrong – as with, say, 2004’s live-action Thunderbirds reboot – it is a money-minded desecration (for those who want a faithful old-school Beatrix Potter animation, the BBC did a perfectly good series in the early 1990s). This Peter Rabbit is more the former than the latter, especially for younger viewers. Like its protagonist, it makes a fair few wrong moves, but ultimately it gets away with it.