Сказки Беатрис Поттер: История создания фильма-балета

the film

The Tales of Beatrix Potter is the only feature film directed by Mills, who is best remembered as a film editor. Mills edited The Red Shoes (1948) and other films directed and produced by Powell and Pressburger that incorporated ballet.

The idea started in 1968 when Christine Edzard travelled from Paris, where she was assistant to the designer Lila de Nobili, to work on the sets of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) in Rome. There she met Goodwin, associate producer for John Brabourne who was making the film, and the two became a couple. They decided they would do something together and while in Britain meeting Goodwin's mother, Edzard saw and heard Beatrix Potter for the first time as Mrs. Goodwin read The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle to her grandchildren. Edzard showed the “thoroughly English” book to Nobili, who was in Covent Garden with The Sleeping Beauty ballet, which featured dancing animals, mice and a cat. Nobili suggested it as a project for the couple, and the Tales as a ballet was born. Lila de Nobili had brought Rostislav Doboujinsky over from Paris to make animal masks for the first act of The Sleeping Beauty and Doboujinsky talked with Goodwin and Edzard. In October 1969, he agreed to make a sample mask for mouse character 'Hunca Munca' whose face is “perhaps the most appealing in the film”. Conceived of as a filmed ballet, Goodwin and Edzard approached Frederick Ashton, former director of the Royal Ballet, to choreograph. Ashton later said: "I was not certain that with films dominated by violence and sex the time was right for such an explosion of sheer charm. But now I think the public is more than ready for something like this." "We were extremely lucky," said Brabourne about Forbes. It was the first collaboration with Goodwin by Edzard, who is known for her meticulous filmmaking, often based on Victorian English sources. The couple went on to found Sands Films. Their productions since include Stories from a Flying Trunk (1979), The Nightingale (1981), Biddy (1983), Little Dorrit (1987), The Fool (1990), As You Like It (1991), Amahl and the Night Visitors (1996), The IMAX Nutcracker (1997), The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream (2001) and The Good Soldier Schwejk (2018). John Brabourne said Goodwin and Edzard "made all the costumes in their own house and we used my production company. Christine brought in that fantastic man, Rostislav Doboujinsky, who did the masks. It was all their conception, their idea, so I got behind it and pushed it but I thought it only fair that Richard should have the Producer credit." With Christine Edzard, Doboujinsky made the masks “on which much of the picture's success depended”. Doboujinsky's original masks for the film, made of bike helmets, polystyrene, hand sewn hair and vision holes covered in gauze, had to be recreated for the stage, with a larger field of vision for the dancers. The artist used moulds of the originals, drilling hundreds of holes at the front and covering the mask in nylon hair “using electrostatic charges.”

The music was arranged by John Lanchbery, who had previously worked with Ashton on La fille mal gardée, Les Deux Pigeons and The Dream, based on themes by Balfe, George Jacobs, Ludwig Minkus, Jacques Offenbach, Arthur Sullivan and others. Producer Richard Goodwin called the film "a diversion a souffle it is an entertainment."

The film was given a Royal premiere in front of Queen Elizabeth II on 1 April 1970.

The film was one of the most successful of the Forbes regime at EMI Films. It was one of the most popular movies in 1971 at the British box office. By June 1972 it earned EMI a profit of £18,000.

A 1971 review by Roger Ebert was favourable: "The stories are told simply and directly and with a certain almost clumsy charm. Instead of going for perfection in the dancing, the Royal Ballet dancers have gone for characterizations instead. The various animals have their quirks and eccentricities, and they are fairly authentic: The frog dances like a frog, for example, and not like Nureyev." Anthony Nield wrote in 2011, "Tales of Beatrix Potter is one of British cinema's true one offs, a film quite unlike any other. Ostensibly aimed at children, this adaptation of Potter’s various animal centric stories was mounted by the Royal Ballet and choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton. The tales are rendered as a series of dances, loosely interconnected by the author as a young girl (played by Érin Geraghty) and her active imagination. There are no words, only music and movement as the performers of the Royal Ballet—in full animal costume—interpret her stories' simple narratives." A digitally restored version was released as a Blu ray DVD in 2011, in commemoration of the film's 40th anniversary.