When Walt Disney offered to adapt the Tale of Peter Rabbit for film in 1936, Beatrix Potter did not hesitate: the answer was no.
During her lifetime, the author exercised minute control over the reams of merchandise spun out of her work, which is why Sony Pictures’ new film adaptation would have been anathema to the Lake District author, according to her biographer.
Potter, who died in 1943, oversaw an empire of products, from dolls to wallpaper, to circumvent attempts by others to create products based on her characters. “The idea of rooms covered with badly drawn rabbits is appalling,” she wrote. Matthew Dennison, whose biography Over the Hills and Far Away was published in 2016, said Potter would not have approved of Sony’s take on a story that has been part of millions of children’s lives.
“Very early on in her career, she decided to design dolls based on her characters, so that no one else could get it wrong …,” he said.
“She was not exactly possessive, but she had a very clear idea in her head of how the books should be. They came about through really close, careful work. There was nothing accidental or spontaneous about them. And she was a bit beady – she was tough with her publishers on things like how much white space or text there was. Every single detail she really thought about.”
Dennison said the film, in which James Corden is the voice of a CGI, twerking Peter, changes the essential character of its eponymous hero. “Peter Rabbit emerges as a bully, and there really isn’t any evidence for that in the story.”
He said Potter felt Kenneth Graham did not get his animals right in The Wind in the Willows. “Toad combing his hair, she felt that was ridiculous. [“A mistake to fly in the face of nature,” she wrote.] Her line was that her rabbit was wearing a jacket, but he was anatomically correct, and aside from wearing a jacket, he behaved like a rabbit.”
Libby Joy, of the Beatrix Potter Society, agreed that the author would not have approved of something “so far removed from her original story”.
Already accused of “allergy bullying” for a scene in which the rabbits attack Mr McGregor’s son with blackberries, knowing he will have an anaphylactic reaction, the Sony film is out in the US.
Reviews have taken issue with what the New Yorker described as “violence and a puerile sense of humour”. The magazine called it “an object lesson in how not to adapt a beloved volume to the screen”, criticising Sony for “replacing the fable-like simplicity of her stories with a knowing veneer of contemporaneity”, and in so doing overlooking “the suggestive darkness at the core of Potter’s work”.
Peter Rabbit had already been made into a CBeebies series, which Joy said had “taken all sorts of liberties” in order to make it exciting and keep children watching.
Dennison said Potter would not have been keen on television or film, and suggested the only successful adaptation of her work was the ballet.
“You take the books and translate them into abstract language, that is mostly visual … I think the ballet does work.”
The problem with putting the creations on screen “is that they become cutesy, which is really quite un-Potter”, he said.
“She’s not cutesy – bad behaviour gets punished, and she’s quite contemptuous of Jemima Puddleduck, who only wants a child. She’s not a cuddly person, and the problem is when her characters are translated to the screen, the danger is they become cuddly.”
Paddington Bear, by contrast, which has been adapted into two films, “is cuddly and funny in the books, so it works for him. But in Potter there is irony and wit, which isn’t translating.”
Potter left her rights to her publisher, Warne, when she died. Since then an industry has grown around her works, with everything from baby clothes to tea caddies available to buy. According to Warne, more than 2m Potter books are sold every year.
