“All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you”
Martin Rosen’s (The Plague Dogs) beautiful and frightening passion project Watership Down faithfully adapts Richard Adam’s beloved novel with dreamy hand-drawn animation and a knockout voice cast. In a rabbit warren near Sandleford, a young buck named Fiver (Richard Briers) has a terrible apocalyptic vision and, together with his friend Hazel (John Hurt), tries to convince their chief to evacuate before it’s too late. When their doomsday panic is dismissed, Hazel, Fiver and their friends Bigwig, Blackberry, Pipkin, Dandelion, Silver, and Violet flee into the perils and temptations of the wilderness, hoping to found a new warren some place safe from the eyes of their thousand predators.
Traumatising children the world over, this cinematic vision of Watership Down has taken on its own life in the public consciousness for its dark tone and bloody violence betrayed by a bucolic kids-animation appearance and PG rating (it was a different time). But what a brilliant adaptation it is; capturing all the epic storytelling, political nuance, enthralling world building (complete with rabbit religion, language and systems of government) and disquieting horror of Adam’s great tale of a hunted people’s struggle between freedom and tyranny. It even features a hit Art Garfunkel song, Bright Eyes, which scarcely leaves a dry eye by the film’s conclusion.