Leonard here. The following column is written by my colleague Mark Searby highlighting British cinema past and present. Please enjoy A Bit of Crumpet.
Think you’re a tough guy, huh? Real tough, yeah? You thought A Serbian Film was funny did you? Threads was a light-hearted documentary was it? Well, let’s see how tough you really are when I sit you down and make you watch (like Malcolm McDowell having his eyes locked open in A Clockwork Orange) one of the most harrowing films of all time – Watership Down. Yeah! YEAH! That’s changed the look on your face. Abject terror now.
All joking aside. Who can sit through Watership Down without feeling dread and anxiety and just a foreboding sense of what is to come? If you can, well done. You are a braver person than I.
It’s been many years since I saw this film and sitting down to watch this new 4K restoration I really had to steal myself before even hitting the play button. It’s a movie that nobody comes lightly to. Richard Adams’ novel, while timeless, is still a disturbing read. And this film adaptation does not stray from that at all. I had forgotten that even during the opening sequence, when Fiver has the apocalyptic vision of what is to become of their warren, it is utterly terrifying. As the beautiful sunshine slowly drops below the trees and causes the ground to turn red, little Fiver begins to go mad and starts talking to his older brother Hazel about blood in the fields. The camera pans across the red streaked fields and towards the trees that are uprooted and swirl around the screen creating a dizzying, and frightening, scene that foretells what is to come for the rabbits if they do not abandon their warren in search of a new place to live. From there the film doesn’t let up. Each action sequence feels more relentless than the last culminating in the dreaded face-off between Woundwart and Blackavar. Followed by the harrowing scene of the unleashed, snarling dog chasing the rabbits around Watership Down. No person can sit through that sequence and not feel sadness. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the epilogue at the end of the film with an elderly Hazel being visited by the black rabbit, “You’ve been feeling tired, haven’t you?” It’s the final knockout blow as you realise death has come.
So why return to Watership Down? Why go through all that again? Well, because the film is a seminal classic not just in the British film industry but also in animation in general. The gorgeous animation of the rolling hills and beautiful fields stands out so much. There is a softness to it that, weirdly, invokes calm and peacefulness. Which is a Yin/Yang to the animation of the animals. Quite scratchy. Almost like the lines don’t quite join and the movements are too rigid. Yet that’s why it compliments the background so much – one is calm, the other is chaotic. There is also a lot of calmness in the abstract animation too. When Fiver follows the black rabbit is one of the most abstract and also haunting scenes in the entire film. A sort of ghostly play sequence.
A lot of the voice work in the film is quite calm. There is no Peter Behn (the voice of Thumper in Bambi) or Kevin Hart (the voice of Snowball in The Secret Life of Pets) in this film. It’s all done by men with their own voices. You can instantly recognise John Hurt, Richard Briers, Denholm Elliott, Roy Kinnear and most of the others. It’s simply them talking. There is no cutesy talk. It’s serious and hard-edged. Yet, once again, that’s why this film stands out, because it doesn’t go all Disney-fied with the voicework. It sticks with the adult tone and runs with it. And it is so much better for not dumbing it down, even with the bunnies.
The film has a very powerful score from Angela Morley. It makes a lot of the scenes really stand on end when it comes to the drama. Almost Bernard Herrmann-esc at times. And who will ever forget the haunting strains of Art Garfunkel’s ‘Bright Eyes’ as it plays. A song that is beautiful, but will always be remembered for appearing in a film where rabbits go feral.
Watership Down, an adventure film that speaks about courage and resilience. It also speaks about death and the afterlife. It deals with some deep ideas at times. It’s the type of film that I imagine scholars could write hundreds of thousands of words about how profound it is and why it echoes human life and what it all means. To the rest of us it is one of the most devastating animation movies ever made. A film every cinephile has to experience at least once. A true masterpiece of British animation that will never be forgotten.
Watership Down is now available on Limited Edition UHD and Blu-ray. Also available on iTunes and Prime Video.