FANTASIA OBSCURA: Ruthless Rabbits and Brave Bunnies but No Female Characters?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, there’s no sugar-coating the story when bad things happen to good characters…
Watership Down (1978)
Distributed by: Embassy Pictures
Directed by: Martin Rosen
There were dark times about the land. There was a fear of what was to come, that if you stayed too long in one place before it came you were doomed. There was the sense of foreboding, that what was about to come would be the end of everyone.
And as bad as pre-Thatcher England was for those who lived it, it was even worse for the rabbits in this film:
Our film opens cold with a creation myth, about how Frith created the world and the animals upon it, including the rabbits. When the rabbits become voracious and eat all the grass, denying the other animals (all of which had been herbivores), Frith asks the prince of the rabbits, Al-Aharirah, to keep them in line. When the prince talks back to Frith, the creator of the world makes some of his creations carnivorous, which then hunt down the rabbits until they are brought to a stable population point; once this was done, Frith then gave the rabbits speed and cunning.
The Frith giveth, and the Frith taketh away…
From there, we get scenes of pastoral Berkshire, over which the opening credits are imposed. Following that, we’re introduced to the rabbits in our cast, starting with Fiver (voiced by Richard Briers), a runt of his litter who gets feelings and visions. This makes him a target of bullies, although his brother Hazel (voiced by John Hurt) does what he can to help him out.
The two are trying to get some of the fresher May flowers growing in the field, before Fiver gets a vision. A very scary, dark, apocalyptic vision:
They run to tell the Chief Rabbit (voiced by Ralph Richardson), who dismisses it out of hand. However, enough of the warren hear Fiver and join him and Hazel as they vamoose in the middle of the night. Among them are Blackberry (voiced by Simon Cadel), Pipkin (voiced by Roy Kinnear), Dandelion (voiced by Richard O’Callaghan), Silver (voiced by Terrance Rigby), and Violet (unvoiced). As a surprise, the Chief Rabbit’s major domo, Bigwig (voiced by Michael Graham Cox), who had originally tried to keep Fiver and Hazel from seeing the boss, decides he’s better off throwing in his lot with the runaways, who make a break for it despite the Chief Rabbit’s edict that runaways be brought back to the warren.
This proves to be a good decision, as we see as the rabbits run into the night a sign placed next to the field by us humans, stating that the area (including the warrens) will be the sight of a commercial development. Fiver’s realized vision, of all that they knew plowed under for the sake of the free market, is relayed to the runaways by Holly (voiced by John Bennet) who catches up with them after the disaster takes place:
(Insert further Thatcher joke here…)
Not that the runaway rabbits have it all easy. Violet, the only female rabbit (doe) among them, gets carried away by a hawk, leaving the group entire composed of males (bucks). This proves to be a problem for the group, who no longer have the means to bring up offspring when they get to the new place, wherever that is. (It’s also a problem in other ways, which we’ll look at more deeply later.) They also nearly lose Bigwig to a snare set up near a warren whose only inhabitant, Cowslip (voiced by Denholm Elliott) is unaware that he’s bait for other rabbits to come on by, used by the farmer who feeds him.
They survive encounters with a farmer who, with his cat and dog, keep an entire hutch of does that the group convince to come with them, as well as the Efrafa warren, a totalitarian state run by General Woundwort (voiced by Harry Andrews) that they make enemies of. But the group, aided by the seagull Kehaar (voiced by Zero Mostel, his last role), ultimately find their destination, atop the feature Watership Down (a real place in Hampshire), to set up a new warren.
But arriving there doesn’t mean the end of their trials, as they fight to keep their new home…
Fighting for the perfect place is a pretty good summary of the making of the film, too. Based on the 1972 debut book by Richard Adams, derived from stories Adams would tell his two daughters about places in Hampshire they’d drive through, the tale of anthropomorphic rabbits who spoke, governed, and prayed like humans while still being rabbits found an immediate audience on publication, after seven rejections by publishers and agents. The story of adventure and survival from the point of view of the local Leporidae was what drew Rosen to the story, which he originally optioned and adapted for screen.
The plan had been to go with animation great John Hubley, who had been with Walt Disney (the man himself, as well as the company) from the beginning, as the director of the film. Rosen had envisaged doing the story in a traditional manner, something few animated films at the time were trying, which made Hubley, who had been pushing the boundaries of experimental animation ever since being a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, an odd choice.
Hubley was on the project long enough to contribute the prologue and a few sequences, which used highly stylized representations of forms, before he left the project, disagreeing about the film going for a more natural look in order to be more faithful to the source.
While it might have been interesting to see a version of the story done entirely in Hubley’s experimental style, it would certainly not have been the film we did get. Bereft of a director and anxious to keep the film going in the direction he wanted it to go, Rosen was forced to take over; this was his first directing task, and he proved to be pretty good at it all said.
Rosen manages to get everything he wanted as director, and gets good results. The rabbits, despite speaking with some of the best British acting talent available at the time, never move in a way that doesn’t suggest that they are rabbits, keeping the action well grounded. The backgrounds and settings, drawn from life from the Adams’ Hampshire in beautiful pastels, is very pleasing to the eye, which makes the violence against and by rabbits all the more striking when it comes up in the film. Which is pretty often, making this film infamous for receiving a ‘U’ classification by the British Board of Film Classification despite reports of kids being traumatized after watching the movie.
The one fault one could find if trying in this well-realized film, despite Rosen’s exemplary writing and direction and aided by a grand score by Angela Morley (who stepped in to finish the project after Malcolm Williamson could not commit beyond a few contributions) along with the featured song “Bright Eyes” sung by Art Garfunkel, is in how this is very much a buck’s hutch. The source material didn’t give any of the female characters much to do beyond being victims, prizes, or background characters, which modern audiences might have an issue with when looking back on this. (Richard Adams, in his later years, regretted having made these choices in his story; his 1996 follow-up collection, Tales from Watership Down, addresses this with more dynamic doe characters.)
The film proved to be quite a success in the UK and other scattered markets around the globe, and made a handsome return for its investors. It’s success was hard to replicate, however; Rosen’s efforts to adapt Adams’ other book The Plague Dogs was not as well received, nor his effort to produce the subsequent TV series from 1999. The later BBC-Netflix miniseries did not endear themselves to audiences the way the first film and source book had, either.
Apparently, the rabbits had it much better in 1978 than they would later on, much like the English that year who-
No, must. Resist. Obvious. Comment…
NEXT TIME: Sometimes, the fight to make a good film can end before they ring the bell in round one…
