Miss Potter's whimsy problem

I watched MISS POTTER this morning, a pleasant little film with Renee Zellweger playing Beatrix Potter, the renowned author of the The Tale of Peter Rabbit and a whole series of small (literally, in size) children's books featuring clothes-wearing animals such as pigs, ducks, and mice. Though most of them were written nearly 100 years ago, they are still in print and still sell quite well. I must confess that I never read any of her stories in my childhood, though I have read a couple since then, and one of my favorite show tunes is "Book Report," a song about the Peanuts kids having to write book reports on Peter Rabbit, from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

[Spoilers follow] The movie covers her early life; we first see her as a young woman under pressure from her social-climbing parents (especially her mother) to make a good marriage, but she'd rather sit in her room, draw whimsical animal watercolors, and make up stories about them. She gets "Peter Rabbit" published, becomes a success, and forms a strong friendship with her mild-mannered publisher (Ewan McGregor) and his relatively headstrong feminist sister (Emily Watson). Potter and the publisher fall in love; her parents disapprove of her marrying a tradesman, but when they finally give in, he dies of something or other (pneumonia it would seem, though Wikipedia says it was anemia) and she's distraught. Discovering how rich her books have made her, she buys quite of a bit of farmland and goes there to live out the rest of her life, eventually marrying a salt-of-the-earth man (Lloyd Owen) whom she'd known in her youth--though the impression is left that it may have been a marriage of convenience more than passion.

The movie looks wonderful--lots of misty shots of well-appointed rooms and lovely landscapes--and the acting is generally fine, with McGregor doing an exceptionally good job in a change of pace role as a quiet charmer, and Watson equally strong as the unorthodox sidekick. There's nothing wrong with Zellweger, but I wanted to see more of McGregor and Watson, partly because their characters are more interestingly drawn. The film has an odd device which pops up occasionally: from Miss Potter's point of view, her painted animals come to animated life; they don't have adventures, they just wink and twitch and hop. I wish the whimsical device had been used more often or not at all; it almost seems like the producer decided they didn't have the money to complete the animation, but the director couldn't cut what he'd done so far. The whole thing could use either more or less whimsy, and definitely more character development--it's the rare recent movie that I actually wished was longer than it was (90 minutes). Generally pleasant, but it should be more something (whimsical, romantic, tragic, funny).