- Angst? What Angst?: Perky doesn’t seem all that upset that he will never return home, and happily joins the others to meet Peter’s mom at the end.
- Broken Aesop: The movie couldn’t be less subtle about lying being bad. However, Peter’s actions don’t have any serious consequences; his sisters easily save themselves from being mailed to Zanzibar, he and Benny make lots of new friends during the journey to try and save the former, and while the villains do kidnap Peter’s friends and Benny out of retribution for being lied to by Peter themselves, Peter only tricked them to protect his friends, as Mr. Todd and the cat were trying to eat them (and would have done so under any circumstances) and Tommy Brock tried to make Benny his slave over petty reasons, and Peter doesn’t even get punished by his mother for shirking his responsibilities and putting himself, his sisters and cousin in danger. Furthermore, Trevor T. Tittlemouse is guilty of the same things Peter did (if not more so) but he’s never even called out for it. Ultimately, the message of the movie comes across more like being a Compulsive Liar is a charming quirk and it will get you lots of new friends just as long as you fess up in the end, and any problems you caused with your lying will fix themselves.
- Designated Hero:
- Peter himself is a slacker and Compulsive Liar who, besides feeling some regret for lying to his new friends, doesn’t learn much of a lesson, nor is even punished by his mother, even after he put himself, his sisters, and his cousin into danger due to the aforementioned slacking off and lying.
- Throughout the film, Benny seems more concerned with stuffing his face whenever he can than saving his cousins. Then there’s the bit where he casually contemplates trying out baked rabbit.
- Designated Villain: McGregor’s cat is treated as a villain for trying to eat Peter and Benny when they trespass on McGregor’s garden with the intent of stealing his vegetables (while Peter is also shirking his responsibilities), and after his owner told him to guard it against looting vermin. McGregor himself later calls his own cat a “mean-spirited fellow” for doing the job he was told to do.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: This movie introduces a white girl rabbit clad in pink named Fluff, 17 years before the debut of Lily Bobtail. Mr. Tod’s more bumbling portrayal here also closely matches his portrayal in the 2012 series.
- Retroactive Recognition: Tara Strong voices Flopsy, using the same voice she would use for Bubbles, one of her first iconic roles, a few years later.
- So Okay, It's Average: It’s Golden Films, so it’s hardly high art, but it’s a pretty harmless and inoffensive kid’s movie with passable if unremarkable animation by Saturday Morning cartoon standards. It probably helps that Beatrix Potter’s stories were already aimed at children, so even with Golden Films nixing the darker and scarier elements from them, they lend themselves much better to a light-hearted movie than the likes of Pocahontas or The Hunchback Of Notre Dame.
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