Watership Down (1978)

When I was kid (or more like a youth) there were two animal novels that knocked my socks off. When I was a gradeschooler it was Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien. When I was a teenager it was Watership Down by Richard Adams. I cannot tell you which of these books I love more. They are both great. What I can say is that as far as their animated adaptations go, Martin Rosen's Watership Down understood the material, and Don Bluth's The Secret Of NIMH didn't.

Secret Of NIMH was Bluth's first film outside of Disney, and it is widely considered his best. Heresy, but I never much liked it. It pales in comparison to the book. And I'll tell you why when I compare it to Watership Down's adaptation. The movie I'm currently reviewing is imperfect. But it's a straight drama and there is nothing cutesy about it. I think The Secret Of NIMH was sort of a watered down concept of why Mrs. Frisby was great. I will never forgive that movie for turning Jenner into a black-and-white villain. But while I don't actually love the Watership Down film, I respect that its cast is entirely rabbits, and there still is nothing cutesy about it. The ugly seagull is a cuter character than the rabbits. (But he's not THAT cute. It amuses me that Kehaan tells the rabbits to "Piss off!" in his first scene. That might be the earliest example I've heard of a person telling another person that specific curse. I love Brits.)

It's also rare for any animated movie being made in 1978 to be a straight drama. Mark Hamill said in an interview on The Tonight Show back in the early 90's that Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm was the first American dramatic animated film released to theaters since Watership Down. I think he was forgetting Ralph Bakshi's The Lord Of The Rings, Fire And Ice, and The Last Unicorn, but there WAS something to that opinion. Animated dramas are very unusual for movie theaters. They are still pretty rare even today.

Woundwart does something that no project should ever do. He makes a realistically-portrayed cartoon rabbit scary. How messed up is that? But he's the stuff of animated nightmares, and the real reason this film isn't for kids. It would get a PG-13 rating today for sure. I liked his ending in the movie. It felt apt.

I like that it kept the weird rabbit language from the book. There was no "Lapine Glossary" at the beginning of the movie for a refresher course for me, but I understood enough, and still appreciated how weird and confusing it was.

I mentioned I don't love the movie. I think the movie felt pressure to release a song in the middle of the movie and Art Garfunkel's "Bright Eyes" is pretty terrible. I'm a bit surprised. About the best thing to be said for it is it isn't sung by the rabbits themselves, so it isn't TOO intrusive.

Another thing I don't like is that I don't think the animation is very good. For 1978 it would have been. But it's often hard to keep the characters straight because they are all designed so similarly and at various points each of them is animated off-model. The only ones I never lost track of once were Bigwig and Woundwart. The animators were kind of failing everyone else.

I will never love this movie as much as I do the book. But unlike The Secret Of NIMH, I recognize the ESSENSE of the story here. The movie understands why the book was cool, and doesn't turn the rabbits into Disney characters like Bluth did with Mrs. Brisby (still hate that name change) and Timmy (who should be Timothy). It's still Watership Down, warts (and Woundwarts) and all. ****.