Forty years ago, my childhood self wasn't in the least bored by Frederick Ashton's balletic animal magic: I saw it twice in cinemas large and small and asked for the soundtrack LP of John Lanchbery's masterly Victorian-potpourri ballet score for my birthday. If I get a bit restless now, it might be because I want more, which is less, in terms of pace; the best stories here are all in the first half, the picnic finale is interminable and no doubt there's something odd about the mice, the frog, the pigs and the fox ending up together and all the same size. Otherwise it's good to see it again and remember the names behind the masks.
Would you guess Wayne Sleep as Squirrel Nutkin - the Till Eulenspiegel of the animal world (Lanchbery's choreographic tone poem here is way ahead of the visual execution) - as well as Tom Thumb to Lesley Collier's Hunca Munca, or Fred himself ekeing out Mrs Tiggywinkle's soft-shoe shuffle? Piece of movie trivia here: the hedgehog seen scampering over the green Lake District fields at the start has someone else inside her. Anyway, it's good to see those colours so well restored, Lanchbery's initial Elgarian sweep no longer clipped of its first note as it was in the 2006 Optimum release.
No doubt certain visuals would be better done today: the grafting of Elstree studio scenes with real Cumbrian landscapes can be ungainly. But who would not melt at the real heart of the film - it comes too soon, as I've suggested - when Alexander Grant's Pigling Bland woos Brenda Last's Black Berkshire Pig on his little porky trotters to the most Tchaikovskyan pas de deux imaginable? (You think it's "Love is Like a Violin", but Lanchbery once demonstrated on my home piano that the tune originally comes from a late-19th-century musical comedy and is called "Take a Letter to My Sweetheart".)
The music, lushly played by the Royal Opera House Orchestra, holds the ear when not much is changing on screen. Petersburg-born Rostislav Doboujinsky's masks are a joy throughout - he returned to Covent Garden to work on the 1993 staging - and there are even a few jaunty angles under Reginald Mills's direction. The film of the Royal Opera House adaptation is always going to be sharper - no extras or documentaries, incidentally, in either format - and the storytelling less sprawling, but the virtues, and the stars, of the original, are worth a lazy hour and a half of your time.
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