Mrs Tiggy-Winkle (Frederick Ashton) is a hedgehog hurrying home to her house in the British countryside. When she arrives there, she finds her washing is dry and takes some of it in, where the iron in the hearth has been sufficiently heated to use on it. But she is quite exhausted after today's excursions and decides to replace the iron and have a sit down, unaware that she is actually a character in the stories of Beatrix Potter (Erin Geraghty), a lonely child with a great interest in Mother Nature, and especially the wildlife around her home...
The stories of Beatrix Potter have endured in popularity ever since they were written, for her own amusement at first, back in Edwardian days, so you would have thought they were a natural choice to bring to the screen, and indeed there have been cartoons on television depicting her creations. However, the highest profile adaptation was for many years this production courtesy of The Royal Ballet in which many of its dancers were stuffed into lovingly created animal costumes and sent pirouetting across a studio to conjure up the essence of the tales for family audiences.
However, for one thing surely it's only little girls who like ballet dancers even if they would struggle to sit through an entire performance, and as there is nary a tutu to be seen here then perhaps this is a pretty specialised work. And for another, there was something distinctly unsettling for many children who happened to stumble across this film on bank holiday television and see those realistic but somehow emotionless, utterly impassive features on the characters as they went about their business amid airless scenery: from some angles this could be the stuff of nightmares.
Look at the way there are sharp spines protruding from through Mrs Tiggy-Winkle's clothes, or the way that Pigling Bland's joyous dance of courtship is abruptly interrupted by the sight of pork products hanging from the ceiling, or most infamously of all, the mere sight of Jeremy Fisher, who is essentially the body of a long-legged man with a man-sized frog's head. No matter how well made these costumes were, there was something offputting about them and not simply for those who were not interested in ballet: Jeremy's story even sees him almost eaten by a pike when he goes fishing, for maximum bad dream material.
So even the potential audience for this film was dwindled by the fact that not many kids like ballet enough to watch a whole one, and the other fact that there's a creepy aspect to much of this, in spite of its great outdoors setting that traditionally should denote health and improving fresh air. It doesn't help things that unless you know the original plotlines, then you might have your work cut out understanding what is going on, for there are many interludes for dancing that do nothing to propel the narrative, leaving you wondering if you've missed something. So unless you like your classic children's literature translated onto film with a terrifying giant owl which winks then tears a squirrel's tail off, then you have to be a really big fan of the terpsichorean arts to appreciate it. Nice try, but it's all a bit weird. Music by John Lanchbery.
I guess it is a little creepy, although I'm not averse to a little culture mixed into children's movies. They tried the same thing with Macauley Culkin in The Nutcracker, which was far more crass.
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