It’s always a delicate path to navigate when you take a well-loved heritage property and attempt to give it a bright, shiny, newly relevant glow.
Sometimes it can work a treat bringing a whole new raft of converts to stories that might otherwise have been deemed too old or fuddy-duddy, and when that happens by all means rings the bells and celebrate the increased longevity of characters who usually deserve to live on well into the zeitgeist.
But when it doesn’t work, and that happens all too often, you wish fervently that the people behind the reimagining had left well enough alone.
Thankfully, 2018’s Peter Rabbit, a remarkably mischievous retelling of Beatrix Potter’s immortal stories of Peter Rabbit, his family and the animals they share their rural idyll with, falls firmly into the former category meaning you can forgo any and all rueful regretting and celebrate instead a story that retains the heart and wonder of The Tale of Peter Rabbit albeit with a lot more noise, music and quipping than the author likely had in mind.
But that was 1901/02 and this is now, and the impressive thing about the film is that it manages to feel idyllically lovely and sweet, with all the charm of the books, while still feeling like a story that will appeal to modern audiences who might otherwise dismiss as too charming and twee.
In this take on Peter Rabbit, our beloved protagonist (voiced by James Corden) is a wisecracking risk taker whose mortal enemy remains Mr. McGregor, a cantankerous vegetable grower who is none too impressed with Peter’s repeated forays into his garden to grab all the fruit and vegetables he can.
Being bold and brave, Peter is not put off by the fact that his dad was killed and put into a pie by Mr. McGregor, an act which scarred Peter, his triplet sisters Flopsy (Margot Robbie), Mopsy (Elizabeth Debicki), and Cottontail (Daisy Ridley) and cousin Benjamin Bunny (Colin Moody), and takes it as his sacred duty to best his opponent at every turn.
He mostly succeeds too, his willingness to push the envelope a means of feeding his family and some of the animals on the property which include dear old Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (Sia), along with Jemima Puddle-Duck (Rose Byrne), Pigling Bland (Ewen Leslie), and Tommy Brock (Sam Neill), a source of deep abiding frustration to his gardening nemesis but delight for those of us watching on.
Peter is big, brave and very funny, his penchant for taking risks and daylight daring a source of great hilarity and sticking it to the man satisfaction, especially when that man has caused him so much grief.
And it’s that grief that gives Peter Rabbit far more emotional grunt that you might otherwise expect to have with the film, directed by Will Gluck to a story by Rob Lieber and Will Gluck, really tugging at the emotional heartstrings on more than one occasion.
That pathos comes courtesy not just of Peter who, in his quest to best his enemy, sets in train a series of events that sees Mr. McGregor’s nephew, Thomas (Domhnall Gleeson), come to the home in England’s Peak District and quickly become as opposed to the local rabbits as his uncle had been, leading to Peter overstepping the mark by some considerable distance.
While there’s a huge amount of visual hijinks afoot including a party scene where the animals make the most of the absence of any humans, a scene will definitely delight the kids but which will likely have any accompanying adults laughing along too, and where Peter and his pals rewire the electric fence with highly amusing results, Peter Rabbit isn’t afraid to go full and deep in its quest to explore what it must be like to be cut adrift in life.
While Peter does have his remaining family members and a sympathetic human called Bea (Rose Byrne), a kindly artist who lives a cross a field from the McGregor home and who won’t believe that her sweet, beloved bunnies could do anything wrong, on his side, the film rather bravely strips away all his bravado to reveal the sad, vulnerable rabbit within.
Remarkably this serious turn of events, not once but at several key points in the film, sits neatly alongside the film’s more verbal and visually slapstick elements.
That’s important because while slapstick will get the kids chortling, along with a judiciously placed fart (when is that ever not funny if done well?), for a film like Peter Rabbit to have any shot at repeat watchability and longevity in peoples’ hearts (which it mostly certainly if you ask my brother and his sons who watch it all the time), it must emotionally connect too.
It does with all age groups and more, careful not to scar any kids watching while allowing adults to fully appreciate what it is like for Peter, and yes, even Thomas, to be more sad and alone than either will admit, and to need the found family that will coalesce around them both by the end of the film.
In this rom-com riot of a film, it is indeed fated that Thomas and Bea will one day form a family (the weirdest Brandy Bunch ever), and that Peter and his siblings will be at the heart of it; what makes Peter Rabbit such a joy to watch is that it goes to town getting to that inevitable ending.
It serves us up unhinged humans behaving terribly, if for quite understandable reasons, rabbits behaving boisterously, a hedgehog eating electrified peanut butter, some very damaging explosions which don’t create their hoped-for objectives and some really affecting moments where all the hilarity is put aside and the film’s humanity, or should that be “rabbityness” shines through.
A delightful film that has humorous vigour and truly moving heart with a pleasing balance between the two, Peter Rabbit is a joyful gem of a kids’ film that well and truly manically entertains its target demographic while serving up watching adults copious bucolic charm, romantic whimsy and some unexpectedly deep soul diving, the kind that happily elevates this film from the hilariously frantic to the movingly lovely and which ensure that Beatrix Potter’s tales, all gussied up in winningly modern new garb, will live on to enthrall a whole new generation, or two.