The Big Whatsit

I think it was Watership Down’s appearance on a Channel 4 Top 100 show that made me dig out my copy, the ‘Deluxe Edition’ - bought for a couple of quid when I was feeling flush - and experience it all over again. Certainly, there aren’t many ‘U’ rated animated features like it, and on a personal note it’s one of the first movies I remember watching in full. As a treat one Christmas, my school (I can’t have been any older than seven) stopped classes one afternoon and screened it on some dinosaur projection system. I can imagine the teachers’ train of thought - nice film about rabbits… good family fare… nothing harmful or corrupting there, and then what must have gone through their minds as the horror-strewn odyssey unfolded on the screen. I bet there were a few nervous Number Six smoked in the staff room that afternoon.

For my part, I loved it. Seeing it as an adult, I fully appreciate the argument that it isn’t really a film for young kids, and clearly by any family-rated movie’s standards, it contains a lot of blood and more than its fair share of haunting imagery. On the flip side, I would also maintain that Watership to some extent delivers precisely what children want from their films, and very rarely get i.e. an unblinking, warts and all, visceral experience. Added to that are enough allegories and lessons to be found within the action to stun your young darlings out of their typical sanitised viewing fare and watch something that contains a genuine degree of heart. If Watership has an overall message, it is that life is always precious, and very often fragile. Behind all the liberalist moaning about how children could have nightmares from seeing it, isn’t that what really matters?

Not that I am suggesting for a second that you ought to strap your kids down, prise open their eyelids Clockwork Orange style and force them to watch, just that there are good reasons for them doing so.

The film is of course based on Richard Adams’s bestselling novel, which just like the former is allegedly for the younger end of the market, though it was some time before I could actually plough through it, neither have I read it in years. I do however recall the movie adaptation closely following much of the text, and crucially getting it right in terms of the spirit and themes Adams attempted to introduce. What really impresses me about the story is the mythology Adams has created for his rabbit characters. These aren’t Disney bunnies, humans in animal form. They have their own stories, their own names for things (e.g. ‘Hrududu,’ the rabbit word for moving motor vehicles, which is presumably - not to mention ingeniously - based on the noise they make) and, critically in terms of the plot, their own ideas about death and the afterlife. The rabbits’ story about how they are all descended from El-ahrairah, the original prince of all rabbits, is told in the film’s prologue, a sublimely nasty piece of film that is shown as a kind of animated series of woodcuts. What it does is firmly establish the rabbits’ own sense of their place in the world - perils are all around. They have a thousand enemies, a fact reinforced by the sequence of dangers experienced by our heroes. Yet they aren’t helpless. Frith, the rabbits’ God represented by the sun, gifts them with cunning and speed.

‘All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies,’ Frith advises. ‘And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you - digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.’

In the world of Bambi and Thumper we are not. Watership presents an altogether harsher reality for the rabbits, and tragically enough ‘reality’ is the key word. Who would want to come back as a bunny after watching it? The story proper opens with frail ’seer’ rabbit, Fiver (Richard Briers) begging his leaders to leave the warren and search for a new home. A human sign erected nearby has given him a vague yet horribly strong premonition of danger, illustrated as he sees their field covered in the dying oranges of the setting sun, which turns into blood. Unfortunately, the chief rabbit is unmoved when Fiver and his brother Hazel (John Hurt) present their case. Fat and complacent, the head of the owsla (rabbit soldiers) doesn’t want to know, and our heroes are compelled to steal away in the night with several others who believe their story. Sure enough, as the rabbits leave, they pass a board they obviously wouldn’t be able to read that tells us the land is scheduled for development. Later in the film, a captain from the owsla catches up with the runaways, and tells them the warren was blocked up by humans. In probably the movie’s most horrific scene, we see red-eyed rabbits clamber over each other, asphyxiating in their desperate struggle to escape.

What follows is the rabbits’ journey through an eternity of (mostly) perilous encounters, on their way to Watership Down, which Fiver describes as ’high, lonely hills, where the wind and the sound carry, and the ground’s as dry as straw in a barn.’ By all accounts, Watership Down really exists somewhere in Hampshire. In the film, it looks for all the world like Pendle Hill, one of the landmarks of Lancashire. Some of the dangers they come across are mild - a badger (or ‘lendri‘) leering at them with blood-soaked teeth from the bushes. Others are less so. One rabbit is randomly picked off by a swooping hawk when she ventures from the safety of a cornfield. Hazel’s attempts to ‘rescue’ some tame doe rabbits from a farmhouse hutch are ever undermined by the presence of an ill-minded and predatory cat.

Creepier still is the heroes’ encounter with Cowslip, a seemingly friendly rabbit who offers to share his warren with them. Things seem too good to be true, and of course they are. The warren is riddled with snares and traps, its occupants ‘kept’ so that they can be killed and eaten by humans. Fiver, for all his moaning, is the one who sees it first, and who later helps to rescue the macho Bigwig (Michael Graham Cox) from just such a snare.

The story culminates as the rabbits discover Watership Down, and find it’s every bit the perfect warren for them. Unfortunately they’ve arrived without any females, and the only place they can find any willing to join them is ruled by the sadistic General Woundwort (Harry Andrews) and his ‘claw first, speak later’ owsla. The survival of the warren depends on whether they can extricate any of the does, some of whom are willing to come, but aren’t allowed to leave…

The fear of meeting the Black Rabbit of Death is all around. ‘When he comes for you, you have no choice but to go,’ Fiver warns, and in one of the film’s more dreamlike sequences, he indeed follows the black rabbit, which he believes is leading him towards the wounded Hazel. This is the bit with ‘Bright Eyes,’ the slightly mawkish theme tune composed by Mike Batt and featuring the vocal stylings of Art Garfunkel. It’s a scene that actually works incredibly well, Garfunkel’s voice taking on an ethereal quality as the black rabbit leaps elusively out of reach. We’re supposed to think of the black rabbit as a sinister character, just like death implies, but by the film’s end, we realise he’s in fact nothing of the sort.

All of which takes place before an animation style that, though primitively crude by twenty first century standards, has a rather beautiful watercolour look to it. The English countryside scenery is detailed and gorgeous, and the animators’ attempt to create a very different ‘look’ for the appearance of rabbit myths and legends is bold indeed. If anything lets it down, it’s the sometimes unnatural way the animals move, no doubt a result of the technologies available at the time. It’s never terrible, and there’s something quite charming about it compared with modern, clinical attempts to naturalise movement in this most artificial of art forms. However, considering it’s around the same time that Miyazaki was putting the finishing touches to The Castle of Cagliostro, the limitations are visibly clear.

But this is nitpicking. The voice cast more than makes up for shortcomings in the animation. My pick of the bunch is Richard ‘Treacle’ Briers, who lends Fiver exactly the nervous quality you would expect from a rabbit who, pre-dating M Night Shyamalan by twenty one years, can see dead people. John Hurt is also on fine form as Hazel, and clearly has the kind of vocal range that makes him ideal for heroic characters (he also made for a memorable Aragorn in the Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings). A roll call of British luminaries - Ralph Richardson, Simon Cadell, Roy Kinnear, Michael Hordern, Denholm Elliott, etc - make up the rest of the cast, and there’s a winning turn from Zero Mostel, who in his last ever part provided the voice of Kehaar, the gull who helps the rabbits when not being the film’s much needed comic relief. His angry ‘Piss off!’ at Bigwig somehow slipped under the censors’ noses, which kind of sums up the movie in general.

In between seeing Watership Down for the first time, not very long after its original 1978 release, and buying the DVD earlier this year, I hadn’t viewed it often, though I’m sure it’s on steady rotation and seems to be a staple of the early afternoon Christmas films circuit. I would certainly recommend giving it a chance. The blood, nastiness and some genuinely unsettling scenes of surrealist horror add to the goals of the rabbits, the prince with a thousand enemies, and it helps to be forewarned that this has no place beside Disney levels of cuteness. In terms of British animation, it’s a real triumph, a movie with heart and soul, and for an art form that contemporaries would have dismissed as ‘cartoons’ it still holds up surprisingly well.