I’m probably about 35 years too late for a first-time
viewing of Watership Down. The renowned and somewhat
legendary downer of an animated movie passed me by in my childhood, a victim
first of my family’s ban on movies and second by my rejection of “adult”
animation when that ban was eventually lifted. (And by The Black Stallion, no less. See also: my review of Hopscotch).
A devotee of Looney Tunes and Disney, I had drawn a line in the sand when it
came to more mature or out-of-bounds cartoons, only capitulating as
Robotech and anime took hold. It’s weird the rules we make
as kids. I guess part of adulthood is when we stop trading so easily in
absolutes. (Most politicians and reality television celebrities notwithstanding.)
Which, let’s face it, my isolation did me no favors. Watership
Down could have helped me get ahead of this game a little. Martin
Rosen’s 1978 animated adaptation of Richard Adams’ novel--which I remember
trying to read once--offers what some of the greatest children’s entertainment
has managed over the years: a glimpse at the adult world through the eyes of
youth.
The story is one perfect for animation. Watership
Down tells of a group of rabbits that leaves its familiar warren in
search of a new home after one of their number, a bunny named Fiver (voiced by
Richard Briers), has a vision of a bloody future. Though the Chief Rabbit
(Ralph Richardson) does not believe this prophecy, as outside observers, we
know it to be true. The camera gives us a glimpse of the land developer’s sign
announcing the new buildings coming to the open field. As we know, the
encroachment of man means certain death for woodland creatures. Pretty soon,
this field, and all within it, will be gone.
Fiver’s brother Hazel (John Hurt) believes his story, and he
rallies a handful of others to leave the warren with him. This includes Bigwig
(Michael Graham-Cox), the sergeant-at-arms, as it were; he will become the
muscle on their trek. Along the way, the rabbits will find all manner of peril:
predators, famers, captivity, and even other rabbits with their own territorial
instincts. Naturally, this is all metaphor. Adams’ original story uses the
anthropomorphized hares to say something about the human condition. Youngsters
watching Watership Down will be made privy to the basic
needs that all living beings require, including hunger, shelter, and the
compulsion to procreate. At one point, Hazel realizes that his new community is
all males, and so even if they do establish a new home, they will die out,
there will be no second generation. This is not something I would have been
able to cotton at age 6, when Watership Down was released,
but surely there would have been an ah-ha moment somewhere down the road, as I
likely would have watched this movie again and again.
For all this reality, though, we must not forget that we are
watching talking cartoon rabbits--or rather, we actually do need to forget, we
have to accept the illusion. And so the story is framed in myth, beginning with
a folk tale about the origin of the world and the rabbits’ place within it.
This sets up symbolism that will carry through the whole of the film, including
the benevolent white rabbit and the ominous black rabbit. This opening, as well
as a later sequence soundtracked by Art Garfunkel singing “Bright Eyes” (a song
written for the movie), features some of the more interesting visuals in the
film, abstracting the more traditional animation style to present something
reminiscent of the paintings and tapestries of different indigenous cultures.
This could partially be the influence of the film’s original director, the experimental
animator John Hubley (whom I briefly wrote about here). Hubley passed away
during the early days of production, but his eye for the different is important
to Watership Down, which might have had less of an impact if
it more closely mirrored the popular Disney style as so many have over the
years (Don Bluth, for instance). The trippiness may have made
Watership Down popular with the midnight movie crowd, but
that undercuts the importance of those sequences as the connector between the
reality of the world being created in the script and the two-dimensional
drawings representing it. The fable gives us a reason to invest while also
laying a groundwork for the interior reality; we can believe in the fantastic
(in this case, talking animals) as long as the fantasy has some foundation.
To be honest, even with the clear high-definition transfer
on the Blu-ray--or perhaps more so because of it--some of the animation in
Watership Down leaves something to be desired. The figures
often lack any defined outline, making them appear separate from their
backgrounds, which though lovingly rendered in very detailed brushstrokes, come
across as more static than I think the filmmakers intended. The inconsistencies
speak to the herculean task of creating a full-length feature film in this way,
especially without the resources or know-how of a more established studio.
Watership Down’s faults are certainly forgivable, and their
prevalence in my mind is probably, once again, down to my lack of nostalgia for
the material.
Those caveats certainly don’t diminish Watership
Down’s impact. The storytelling is still quite strong, and some of
the choices are daring even without placing Watership Down
in its historical context. As a friend pointed out to me earlier when
discussing the movie--the novel is one of her favorite’--the interesting thing
is there is no hero. Hazel is not a character who is actively remarkable. Quite
the contrary, he expects Bigwig to take point in most things, and the mission
is reliant on Fiver’s vision; rather, my friend suggests Hazel’s role is to see
the strength in others and foster that. In that sense, he is the best kind of
leader. Once again, a good lesson for young folks to learn. We all have our
roles, and a community supports that to the benefit of all and the detriment of
none.
This is a lesson that extends beyond one population or
society. The journey of Hazel and the rest in Watership Down
is life itself: birth and death, desire and satisfaction, peace and war, honor
and treachery. This is the stuff that carries us all through at some point, and
for a youngster picking up Watership Down at the right age,
Adams and Rosen provide a sort of how-to guide that will likely stick with him
or her throughout the years.
1 comment:
I, too, watched this fairly recently and for the first time. And I also felt that it would have been a much better film with a good dose of nostalgia attached to it. But I was afraid of every movie as a kid, so it's probably best that I hadn't seen it in my youth!
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