Aces of Weird: Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978)
Remembered as the kids' movie that terrified a generation, this classic British fantasy still casts a deep, dark and enthralling spell
Presented with what was ostensibly a cartoon about talking bunny rabbits, the British Board of Film Classification declared in 1978, “Animation removes the realistic gory horror in the occasional scenes of violence and bloodshed… while the film may move children emotionally during the film’s duration, it could not seriously trouble them.”
Watership Down was duly awarded a ‘U’ certificate – suitable for all – and a cult movie was born.
Released in the October half-term of 1978 and first aired on the BBC over the 1985 Christmas hols – just before bedtime – Watership Down hit younger viewers like a vision of the apocalypse. Children raised on Bugs Bunny and Peter Rabbit were unprepared for the movie’s naturalistic savagery, replete with nightmare imagery straight out of The Shining. It was ruthless in its depiction of life on the lower rungs of the food-chain, a view of the world through the eyes of its most vulnerable; no wonder children responded to it so strongly.
The source novel was published in 1972, when author Richard Adams had only just turned fifty and spent most of his life as a civil servant. The tale of a colony of rabbits forced to undertake a dangerous odyssey across the English countryside in search of a new home, it was published and marketed as an adult novel, yet won two prestigious awards for children’s fiction (the Carnegie Medal for Writing and the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize).
The book sprang out of tales that Adams rattled off for the amusement of his daughters during long car journeys between London and Stratford Upon Avon. At the girls’ insistence, Adams got those stories down on paper, developing his own leporine mythology and invented language, while drawing upon Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces to embrace eternal themes of (male) heroism, mortality and nature…
