ANI-MOVIES, *Watership Down

Taking a hint from Animal Farm, Richard Adams showed the world from the point of view of rabbits in the British countryside in his novel Watership Down, named after an actual hill in England. Nepenthe Productions was tasked with not only doing a full-length animated version of Adams' book, The Plague Dogs, a few years later. Released in 1978, the movie was not some Disney-esque "funny animal" cartoon, but a gritty realistic perspective of how rabbits are constantly being on the bitter end of the circle of life. The popularity of this lead into a later animated TV series, plus an animated mini-series.

The movie begins with an opening narration showing how rabbits believe that the whole world was created by a god who punished the growing bunny populations by giving all the other animals with defensive or offensive gifts that would help curb the rabbits tendancy to multiply. The story then opens on the precognitive rabbit Fiver warning his brother Hazel that their warren is in danger of being destroyed. After warning the head rabbit to no avail, the brothers lead a group of runaways on an exodus, helped by the warren's former captain Bigwig. The surviving rabbits then set out to find a suitable place for a new home, all while avoiding other shifty bunnies, predators, and humans. They evantually find a perfect place at the top of a hill, but don't have any does to have any future children, so they scout out a nearby rabbit warren which is under the iron paw of General Woundwort. Hazel plans to liberate some of the female rabbits, leading to a great escape, and a bloody last stand between the warring warrens.

Watership Down is largely faithful to the original novel, with amazing music by Art Garfunkel. The cast is made of big names in British theatre like John Hurt and Michael Graham Cox, who also both provided voice overs the Ralph Bakshi's The Lord Of The Rings. This is by all intentions not meant to be watched by younger viewers, although it is a more honest approach to the way real animals cohabitate.