By Elizabeth Buzo
“I saw Watership Down at the right age,” filmmaker, Guillermo Del Toro, told The Criterion Collection of Martin Rosen’s classic 1978 animation. “Right at the moment when I was about 13-14, I was leaving behind my childhood and entering my teen years, and the movie was a sort of rite of passage. I saw a level of realism and drama and violence in the animation. It was such a watershed moment that I then decided to read Richard Adams’ book. I came to the book after the film. I then read Adams’ Plague Dogs and The Girl In A Swing, and I really became quite enamoured with his prose. But the film was the moment in which a kid my age came to realise that animation was not just a medium for children’s stories, but it could be something else.”
Like other great children’s stories, Watership Down offers as much to adults as it does to youngsters. It’s an adventure story about a group of rabbits who leave their warren and trek across the countryside to find a new home. Along the way, they encounter danger from humans, predators, and, surprisingly, other rabbits. In addition to the action-packed story and memorable characters, Watership Down also explores the themes of community and tyranny versus freedom. In addition, the cast is a veritable who’s who of great actors: John Hurt, Ralph Richardson, Richard Briers, Nigel Hawthorne, Denholm Elliot and Zero Mostel. Yet it’s the animation that is truly outstanding. The film is drawn in the style of British landscape painting, but with bursts of surreal imagination. Any student or enthusiast of animation will appreciate the amazing work of the animators, who achieve brilliance in a time way before computers.
A favourite among filmmakers (Wes Anderson, Zack Snyder, Richard Kelly, and many more have professed their love for it), Watership Down remains one of the most powerful – though decisive – animated films ever made. “Some people get it and some people don’t,” director, Martin Rosen, told The Strait Times. “Some people get it, very powerfully. I’m accused of waking people up at night, 25 years after they saw it.” And with a new BBC/Netflix CGI miniseries currently in the works featuring the voices of John Boyega, Ben Kingsley, James McAvoy, Gemma Arterton, and Nicholas Hoult, it looks like Watership Down might be set to terrify a whole new generation of kids…
