Watership Down (1978)

(On Cable TV, August 2019) If you believe some of the chatter about Watership Down, you may expect an unbearable for-adult bloody drama featuring rabbits living in a dark and pitiless world. That’s true, but it may be misleading: Watership Down is shocking if you’re expecting a fluffy Disney wildlife fantasy featuring cute little bunnies, but if you go in the film expecting the worst, the result simply feels … appropriate for what it’s trying to do. Adapted from Richard Adams’s well-regarded book aimed at older children, this is an attempt to tell a more sombre story that acknowledges the merciless nature of wild animals in their natural environment. When a rabbit understands that their meadow is going to be razed over by residential development, he flees to greener pastures and encounters hardened opponents. The tone is resolutely not funny nor easy: Watership Down is tooth-and-claw nature, with protagonists either dying or coming close to it on a regular schedule, blood flowing from their wounds. It’s not gratuitous, though—despite the jerky, disappointing animation and the sombre tone, I found quite a bit to respect in the final result. The opening segment is wonderfully animated (far better than the rest of the film), and it sets up a very effective reprise of “First … they have to catch you” late in the film. I wasn’t horrified by the result (well, not as much as the generations of eight-year-old kids who legendarily sit down to watch another Disney movie and bawl their eyes out for 90 minutes) but neither did I like it very much. On the other hand, Watership Down is a respectable film, and one that should have had more imitators.