Another of the movies that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM soon is the animated Watership Down. You can see it tomorrow, April 5, at 8:00 AM.
The movie opens with an origin story, about how the Sun god, named Frith and voiced by Michael Hordern, created all the animals and plants and how the animals lived harmoniously as herbivores and mostly alike. The rabbits, however do what rabbits do and multiply, eating too much of the grass. This causes Frith to turn a bunch of animals into carnivores who will be more than happy to eat rabbits, although rabbits do get the gifts of speed and cleverness.
Cut to the present day, in a bucolic part of Britain. Fiver (Richard Briers) is a rabbit living in a warren run by a chief (Ralph Richardson) and his deputy Capt. Holly (John Bennett), where everybody lives happil, eating, sleeping, and creating new little bunnies. Except one day Fiver, who is a bit timid by nature, has a vision in which the field suddenly becomes covered with blood. (It's later explained that developers turn the field into a new housing estate, severely disrupting the warren.) Fiver and his brother Hazel (John Hurt) go to the chief with the suggestion that the rabbits are going to need to move somewhere safer, although understandably a lot of the rabbits aren't so certain they agree, thus splitting the warren in two.
Fiver, Hazel, and a handful of other rabbits leave even though the chief and Capt. Holly try to stop them. The smaller group are successful in getting away, although trying to find a new place to start a new warren that's safe isn't going to be easy, since these rabbits have no idea where they're going and little idea of the big bad world that's out there. They have various misadventures in the forest and at a farm where a man breeds rabbits for food, before coming to the conclusion that they have to go someplace like the top of a hill that has a commanding view of the surrounding area in order to be safe.
They get there and live happily ever after, with one small problem. They don't have any doe rabbits. How are they going to procreate and make the new rabbits necessary to keep the warren going? Fortunately, they also save a seagull named Kehaar (Zero Mostel) who has lost his way and is somewhat injured. Kehaar offers to fly around looking for doe rabbits. They eventually learn of another warren called Efrara where the leader, General Woundwort (Harry Andrews) is such a nasty dictator with underlings who keep the regular rabbits in a state of terror that some of them would like to leave if only they could get the courage to do so. Hazel infiltrates the warren, becoming one of Woundwort's camp commandants if you will, in a move that seems like it would have been a strategic blunder. Of course Hazel leads a break to safety, and Woundwort is pissed, going after the escapees.
Watership Down is a surprisingly dark movie for something that sounds on the surface like it's going to have the trappings of a children's book. And since animation is -- and was even more so in the 1970s -- thought of as a medium for children's stories, Watership Down's open look at the violence of death is not what you might expect. Then again, Bambi many years earlier also did so. Unsurprisingly, since Disney was really the only quality animation studio in the 1970s -- compare them to the animation of a movie like Treasure Island that I reviewed not too long ago -- it stands to reason that people are going to compare Watership Down to Disney. It's a comparison that doesn't always come off well, particularly in the case of Kehaar the gull who to me is a rather obnoxious character.
The animation is better than what Hanna-Barbera or Filmways were doing on TV, but not as good as the Disney classics. The story is good, although from what I've read one might get more out of the movie if one is already more familiar with the book, which I never read. A plus however is that this, being a British production, is also rather different from what one would expect from a Hollywood movie. Definitely, Watership Down is one that's worth watching, warts and all.
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