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.
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