Her ashes were to be scattered somewhere near her home by her faithful shepherd Tom.
This was another prescient move. If she had opted for burial, a loud, rotating sound would be emanating from the local churchyard.
The first rumblings would have begun in late September when the trailer to this brash CGI adaptation of Peter Rabbit turned up on YouTube.
It showed her rebellious bunny throwing an Animal House-style party. A badger hurls a hedgehog at a dart board – a shot that seems to riff on the dwarf-throwing scene in Wolf Of Wall Street. Peter, meanwhile, is flipping lettuce leaves to his furry entourage like a banker in a strip club.
With a grinding inevitability, the bunny was voiced by James Corden.
The opinions expressed in the YouTube comments section ranged from shock to outright horror.
As is often the case, the trailer doesn’t tell the whole story. Parents hoping to conserve memories of their own bedtime reading will no doubt be hopping mad as director Will Gluck makes ever clunkier attempts to get down with the kids.
But the younger children at the family press screening I attended seemed to be lapping it up.
The story picks up very roughly where Potter left off. Peter, now an orphan, is still making his daring raids on Mr McGregor’s vegetable patch, aided by his sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail (voiced by Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki and Daisy Ridley).
It turns out that Mr McGregor (Sam Neill) isn’t long for this world. After Peter tries to ram a carrot up what I believe is commonly known as his “builder’s bum”, the old grump collapses, clutching his chest. Peter returns to the warren, bragging that he has slain the old dragon.
As McGregor made rabbit pie out of his own father, this is understandable, but I still found his tone a little disconcerting.
A raucous party to celebrate the OAP’s murder is short-lived. Turns out, McGregor has left the farm to his city slicker nephew Thomas, a stressed-out middle manager at Harrods (Domhnall Gleeson). After breaking up the party, Thomas busies himself with building new defences for the vegetable patch.
But Peter soon has another reason to resent Thomas. His greatest ally against old McGregor was Bea (Rose Byrne), an animal-loving artist who lives next door.
To Peter’s horror Bea and Thomas, who keeps his rabbit-hating a secret, start mooning over each other. As Peter’s twitchy nose is put further out of joint, everything goes a bit Bugs Bunny-versus-Elmer Fudd.
The violence is deliberately cartoonish but I doubt Potter could have imagined her beloved bunny booby-trapping the farmhouse so that McGregor is repeatedly frazzled by electric shocks. Or that he would exploit a blackberry allergy by catapulting the fruit into his rival’s mouth.
This scene, which ends with Gleeson injecting himself with an EpiPen, has already led to protests from allergy sufferers in the US.
I had a slightly different problem; the worse Peter behaved, the less I cared about him. The casting doesn’t help.
In Paddington, which this film seems desperate to emulate, they took great care with the bear’s voice, going so far as replacing Colin Firth with Ben Whishaw halfway through the production. But I don’t imagine much work went into the casting of Peter.
The Gavin & Stacey co-writer and star may be well known on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to his US chat show but Corden is too old, too cocky, and way too self-assured.
In the book, Peter’s behaviour was down to his animal nature and his youthful exuberance.
Here he seems to be motivated by arrogance, loutishness and a very unattractive sense of entitlement. On the plus side, the animation is slick, the side characters are amusing and there are a couple of decent gags that Gluck, unfortunately, can’t help repeating. There are even a couple of morals, one about tolerance and the other about respecting nature: “They were here first, we’re the latecomers,” Bea tells Thomas.
That’s not strictly true about bunnies (they hopped over with the Romans), but at least it chimes with Potter’s love of conservation. For a brief moment, poor Beatrix might just have stopped spinning in her grave.
